US Insurance Giants UnitedHealth and Humana launch Blockchain-Driven Effort to Tackle Data Issues

Five of America’s leading health insurance companies Humana, MultiPlan, Quest Diagnostics and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum are coming together to pursue a blockchain-related model to improve the quality of healthcare data and reduce administrative costs.

UnitedHealth and Humana put aside their rivalry in the healthcare insurance sector but to develop the technology together due to increased costs facing healthcare providers in terms of changes to demography data.

According to UnitedHealth Group’s website, Optum is a leading information and technology-enabled health services business dedicated to helping make the health system work better for everyone.

A joint statement by all the participating companies read:

“The companies will explore how the technology could help ensure the most current health care provider information is available in health plan provider directories. Providing consumers looking for care with accurate information when they need it is essential to a high-functioning overall health care system.”

It also explained that most healthcare organization, systems, service providers and stakeholders usually use different copies of patient’s data which can result in high cost of merging process, it also consumes time.

Experts believe that $2.1 billion is spent yearly across the healthcare sector just to maintain service provider’s data. This development will greatly reduce that cost burden. Other benefits described include how sharing information and data across the healthcare sector using blockchain technology would improve accuracy of data, reduce administrative bottlenecks and finally improve overall access to quality health services.

However, as of writing it is not known if this new model would utilize an existing system or the development of a different one.

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