Change Healthcare and TIBCO Software, today announced a collaboration to build the first blockchain-powered smart contract system for healthcare to enable payers to automate processes across the healthcare transaction lifecycle. Using the Change Healthcare Intelligent Healthcare Network blockchain technology and TIBCO’s smart contract developer project, Project Dovetail automates events across the healthcare transaction processing lifecycle.
Benefits of Blockchain-Powered Smart Contracts in Healthcare
Today, payers must use myriad commercial and custom systems to automate various aspects of healthcare transaction processing that have gaps and require manual intervention or additional coding. Smart contracts present a simpler, more efficient, and lower-cost solution because they enable self-executing business rules that payers embed on a blockchain and trigger automatically based on events that occur in a transaction. When any event in the healthcare transaction lifecycle is completed, the blockchain ledger is updated.
It is intended that payers will be able to use this new platform to build healthcare transaction-related smart contracts on the Intelligent Healthcare Network to increase the efficiency of healthcare transaction processing (including claims adjudication and payment processes) and improve providers’ revenue cycle performance with faster resolution and remittance. Change Healthcare and TIBCO also plan to provide a developer environment aimed at creating the next generation of healthcare transaction applications that utilize blockchain and smart contracts.
Project Dovetail: Making Smart Contracts Smarter
In addition to the Change Healthcare Intelligent Healthcare Network blockchain capabilities, this collaboration will aim to leverage Dovetail, TIBCO’s project for making smart contracts smarter. Project Dovetail, which is slated for public availability in the near future, will provide a development framework to allow payers and financial institutions to build smart contracts governing healthcare transaction processing. With Dovetail, users will gain access to a model-driven environment that promotes the creation of smart contracts that can run on any blockchain or cloud platform, and thus increases agility, flexibility, and time to market.
 Change Healthcare Intelligent Healthcare NetworkÂ
To date, Change Healthcare Intelligent Healthcare Network reaches approximately 2,100 government and commercial payer connections, 5,500 hospitals, 900,000 physicians, and 33,000 pharmacies. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018, it facilitated nearly 14 billion healthcare transactions and $2.0 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures.
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“This collaboration with TIBCO is part of our larger initiative to simplify and standardize healthcare transaction processing and help move the industry to real-time adjudication on the Intelligent Healthcare Network,” said Aaron Symanski, chief technology officer, Change Healthcare. “By bringing smart contracts to claims processing, payers can share a standardized approach that lets them easily write, visualize, test, audit, and implement smart contracts for automating healthcare transaction processes.”