Tuesday night at Genscape the Louisville Digital Association held its monthly meeting, and the speaker was Kyle Culver from Humana. Culver is working on a project that will utilize blockchain in the healthcare space, but not in a way that you might expect.
There’s not as much of a rush right now to put everything on the blockchain as you might expect, but there IS a rush to figure out the best possible uses for this technology. This is what Culver is doing right now in real life. Humana announced just Monday that they will be partnering with UnitedHealth Group, Optum, and more to pilot a program that would significantly reduce non-medical healthcare administration costs by using blockchain technology.
The program will aim to keep public physician records – things like name, address, phone number, and whether they are accepting new patients – on the blockchain where they can easily be updated and shared across health insurance providers, thereby cutting down on redundancies within the healthcare system overall.
The purpose of this experiment is to see how blockchain functions in a real-world application on something that is public information and doesn’t have to be protected. The group will identify any problems that might arise when the application is scaled up to things that are protected information and see whether it makes sense to take that next step.
Culver also talked about blockchain in more general terms, as this is still an emerging technology that most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around. One of the best explanations he gave all night was a simplified way to understand ICOs. An ICO, he says, is basically if Chuck E. Cheese is going to sell tokens before opening a new location and use that capital to build the Chuck E. Cheese. It’s so simple.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Culver and the others discover through this project.
Maggie Kimberl is the Content Manager at NowSourcing.