US Health Insurance Giant Wants To Use Blockchain To Secure Data

Anthem is the name of the second largest health insurance company in the United States, which according to the blockchain latest news today, has a lot of plans for the distributed ledger technology that is backing Bitcoin (BTC) and many other cryptocurrencies. As reports show, the US health insurance giant Anthem wants to use the blockchain technology in order to secure medical data of all 40 million members during the next three years.

As reports by Forbes showed on December 12, the company plans to use the technology to enable secure access for patients to their medical data. It also wants to ensure giving them the possibility to share the data as they see fit.

The CEO of the US health insurance giant Anthem, Gail Boudreaux, spoke at the 8th Annual Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York and said:

“What blockchain potentially gives us the opportunity to do is not worry about those trust issues. We have an opportunity now to share data that people can make their own decisions on.”

As other reports in the cryptonews show, the company is right now running a pilot test to smaller groups of members who can now use a mobile app to scan QR codes and instantly allow different healthcare providers to access their health records for a limited amount of time. The chief digital officer at the US health insurance giant Rajeev Ronanki recently said:

“We think it’s a pretty transformative thing for health […] We’re essentially creating a permission-based system that would allow consumers to own their healthcare data, and then make it available to providers as appropriate.”

Right now, Anthem is planning to roll out the new blockchain based system in several phases starting from 2020. As a major US health insurance giant, the company needs to back the developments with even more updates and materials which will show us how blockchain could help the field of health insurance.

Before this, Anthem partnered with another US health insurance giant named Aetna, as well as the PNC Bank and IBM to create a blockchain network that is tailored to the healthcare industry. This solution was described by many as a way to remove the friction, duplication and administrative costs that continue to be a major issue in the healthcare industry.