For decades, the healthcare industry has faced the challenge of juggling a huge (and growing) amount of patient, payer, provider and pharmaceutical data with managing accuracy, access, security and privacy. There has been continuous innovation and investment aimed at breaking down information silos and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of data reporting and sharing. Hyperledger technologies power an increasing number of the solutions that are taking on these challenges head on and creating new models for the industry.
Read on for a sampling of these Hyperledger-powered solutions and the ways they are helping to streamline a range of critical healthcare processes. And join the conversation using #HyperledgerHealth on social channels.
Avaneer Network
Founded by a consortium that includes Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Cleveland Clinic, HCSC, IBM, The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc., and Sentara Healthcare, Avaneer Health has built a private, secure, and trusted technical healthcare network where stakeholders can collaborate to streamline and improve the healthcare experience while increasing administrative efficiency. The Avaneer Network leverages Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain technologies to ensure privacy, security and content-based use of data. Participants connecting to the Avaneer Network have access to a range of solutions for securely transacting and administering healthcare and deploy innovative solutions that streamline processes. The first network participants, all founding members of the consortium, represent 80 million covered lives and 14 million annual patient visits.
IBM Digital Health Pass
IBM Digital Health Pass, built on Hyperledger Fabric, offers a multi-credential verifier that organizations can use to manage and execute their verification policies for COVID-19 and vaccination status in a way that balances the privacy of the individual with the requirements set by the organization and local health authorities. With IBM Digital Health Pass, organizations can verify multiple types of COVID-19 health credentials, such as Good Health Pass, IBM Digital Health Pass, Smart Health Card and EU Digital COVID Certificate. Privacy is central to the solution, where the verifier application minimizes the personal data that is ever displayed to the user through the execution of business rules and it never lets any personal data leave, or be stored in, the verifier app.
KrypC Pharmaceutical Delivery Supply Chain Solution
KrypC’s pharmaceutical supply chain solution uses Hyperledger Fabric to connect pharmaceutical manufacturers and carriers to collaborate on the safe delivery of drugs. The solution focuses on end-to-end traceability to provide an audit trail for the efficacy of drugs by capturing and verifying information such as the manufacturing date, location in transit, and more. With multiple handoffs across handling agents across continents, there is a crucial need for trusted, end-to-end visibility of pharmaceutical shipments, conditions, and documents. With this solution, Kypc leverages blockchain’s inherent ability to trace drug provenance and create an immutable record of the lifecycle of a drug and how it was handled to address the challenges the pharmaceutical industry faces, both in sourcing and distributing drugs.
Synaptic Health Alliance Decentralized Provider Data Directory
The Synaptic Health Alliance is a coalition of healthcare leaders working to solve their industry’s toughest problems through blockchain technology. Their objective is to create a blockchain-powered platform that enables a culture of innovation, removes friction and solves the shared challenges impacting constituents across health care today.
For their first application, they tackled the challenge of providing healthcare organizations with accurate provider demographic data. Today, healthcare organizations typically collect provider demographic data in separate IT systems maintained by each organization independently. This promotes vast inefficiencies and duplication of efforts (costing roughly $2.1 billion across the industry), while also potentially reducing data quality.
To solve this, Synaptic created a blockchain-based Decentralized Provider Data Directory leveraging Kaleido and the capabilities of Hyperledger FireFly. Through the power of blockchain, participants are now able to crowdsource provider demographics. Token economics incentivize the creation of accurate data, which can then be used by other providers to update their own records, reducing duplication of effort, streamlining administration, and saving money.
Ongoing activity in the space is driven by the very active Hyperledger Healthcare Special Interest Group (SIG), which unites healthcare professionals and technologists from around the world in advancing the state of the healthcare industry through the implementation of technology solutions using blockchain technologies in general, and the umbrella of Hyperledger frameworks and toolsets in specific. It includes subgroups focused on patients, payers and healthcare interoperability.
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