Capital One is going to test out blockchain for health care claims and analytics, the company announced Monday.
The banking giant is teaming up with mix of partners including blockchain startup Gem and the health care API platform firm PokitDok in order to build a new claims service that uses the digital ledger technology at the heart of BitCoin to track claims for medical clients. The firm is also building up a system that will estimate patients’ out-of-pocket health care costs, according to Healthcare IT News, and has partnered with secure B2B payments and cash management company Viewpost and the semantic search platform ClearGraph on separate products.
The hope is that blockchain will make tracking medical claims more secure and efficient, and the services may be available beginning in 2017.
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“We’re seeing unprecedented transformation in the payments space as rapid advances in digital technology are reimagining the client experience,” said Capital One executive vice president Patrick Moore in a statement.
“We see the new network models and data analytics capabilities as an opportunity to reinvent treasury management to better meet the needs of clients, not only increasing payment efficiency but also generating actionable information about their business,” he continued.
Gem has an OS platform that the company describes as “an operating system that connects our customers to” the blockchain. “If blockchains are about building global computers, GemOS is about how you use that computer to process information across an ecosystem,” the firm says on its website. PokitDok is a cloud API company that specializes in digital health care transactions.
Blockchain technology has been on a tear, with IBM (IBM) projecting that it will be used by 15% of banks worldwide by 2017.
Correction: Wednesday, October 26, 11:35 AM: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Viewpost and ClearGraph were involved in the new health claims and analytics project. It has been corrected.