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Blockchain Takes on Healthcare and Delivers

Solve.Care CEO, PRADEEP GOEL, told us about the company’s groundbreaking partnership with the Arizona Care Network and how this is just the first step in revolutionising the healthcare industry on a mass scale.
Care.Wallet
(Pradeep Goel, CEO of Solve.Care)

Tell us about your launch with the Arizona Care Network.

The Arizona Care Network is a network of 5,500 healthcare providers who are all working together to deliver coordinated care for high risk, high cost, complex cases. We have just launched Care.Wallet for Physician for primary care providers of Arizona Care Network (ACN). This is the first solution utilising blockchain technology and digital currency adopted by a leading Accountable Care Organisation. Through the wallet, Arizona Care Network is now delivering to the physicians real-time information about the opportunities to improve care for every individual the physician sees and, based on these improvements, reward the physicians in real time. We launched the Care.Wallet for Physician to do three things; better care coordination, better disease management and instant payments. Care.Wallet for Physician contains Care.Cards that interact within the blockchain ecosystem of ACN. The wallets and the cards automatically sync with each other, resulting in real-time coordination of information and administration across stakeholders, and create a unique user experience.

Transactions in the network occur using the digital healthcare currency called Care.Coin, the first digital currency used for healthcare payments. The primary advantage of Care.Coins is instant and transparent payments across the system. Physicians receive Care.Coins into their Care.Wallet and can redeem them for USD. Next, ACN will launch a Care.Wallet for patients. If I make an appointment to go see the doctor tomorrow and I’m in the Arizona Care Network, then ACN will analyse my clinical data and tell the doctor not only what I’m coming in for, but also that I have a potential risk of diabetes, for example, so to run some tests for that. So, each visit then becomes a lot more effective, because I’m going in for A and I’m getting B and C service based on my healthcare history analysis, which will prevent me from getting chronic diseases. The whole idea of the blockchain here is to keep all the parties coordinated, keep them in sync with each other without needing everyone to have some complex integration, and pay them in real-time for good behaviour and good results. That’s the core use-case for Arizona Care Network.

Congratulations on the launch, it sounds amazing! What are you most proud of so far?

From my point of view, the main point here is the launching of a blockchain network for these physicians. We’ve already launched a provider reward program for this network of doctors, and in the near future all of them will be able to coordinate care across specialties and patients – a primary care physician, or GP, will be able to refer to an ophthalmologist, and the patient is always in sync with both. What’s happening now is that several insurance companies are asking ACN how to use the leverage the power of this network to manage their members’ conditions such as diabetes, cancer, mental health, substance abuse and happy episodes such as pregnancy.

Almost every day, there’s a conversation with an insurer about how they can leverage this care coordination framework and provider network to deliver better care, better value with lower administrative costs and faster payments. And the use of Blockchain as the foundation of this platform makes this network highly shareable with appropriate data security and transparency between all network participants. For example, a large insurer with several million members are considering issuing Care.Wallets to all their members, so the members can make appointments with the provider network in real-time and eliminate need for benefit plan verification and in many cases eliminate referral pre-authorisation steps.

This changes the equation in terms of access to care, administrative cost of care and patient-provider engagement. This is a completely new way for insurers to manage risk, cost, provider relationships and patient experience. That’s the vision behind blockchain, right? To decentralise all the administrative barriers which make healthcare so complicated. If you start decentralising the physicians first, the patients follow.

How is this going to revolutionise healthcare?

We started with only a few use-cases – eligibility, enrolment, billing, payment, and now we have about 24 use-cases in flight. This is really exciting, because I’ve always come from a view of making healthcare easier to access, easier to manage and easier to pay for, and now we’re entering the realm of easier to measure and instant rewards based on result, instead of just paying for services rendered. We are also building very innovative patient engagement cards like ‘How Are You Feeling Today?’, which is a card that lets patients form a personal network with their family, friends, concerned colleagues, doctors, specialists, and other care givers and providers, all of whom can keep real-time tabs on how you’re doing; post-surgery, post-accident, chronic disease, and other types of health episodes.

All these people stay in sync for clinical and administrative functions, and it’s very secure network. You have to give them permission to access your chain, and you take it away, so we manage the patient’s control over who gets to see what about them. Healthcare is always a catch-22, right?

Doctors won’t adopt a technology if patients are not on it, patients won’t adopt it if doctors are not on it and insurance companies won’t adopt it if both are not on it. So, there’s always a question at the beginning – who will, where will you start? I’ve always said, initially it needs to be a top-down model. We create economic incentives for a group of providers to adopt, and then will draw the rest of stakeholders in. Having a physician centric view is great because it draws in both the payer and patient.

The physician centric launch has been a very good decision. Each doctor sees thousands of patients a year, so when they adopt a piece of technology, a thousand patients adopt it by proxy. Doctors talk to certain specialists, they talk to certain labs, they talk to certain pharmacies, they have this network within a network, and everybody’s coordinated, without the need for a big mainframe in their backyard. It’s in your hand, in your phone, and the doctors have all the data on the chain on their phone.

If you’re looking at a fintech audience, I would like them to hear the following three things; this is mass adoption of blockchain in healthcare that will really save clear economic value for payers, providers and patients, all three. Insurance companies, doctors and patients all have economic value, clinical value and administrative value. Economic value for the payer is lower cost and better results. For the doctor it’s faster payments, accurate payment, less bureaucracy and more time to spend with the patient. Faster payment and fewer administrative steps is a really important thing for doctors. And for the patient it’s clarity on what’s happening and why it’s happening, what their role is in getting well. It’s better transparency and better results.

So, the point for the fintech community is that our platform and use cases are driving real economic value, not theoretical value. The second thing is that this model is extremely replicable and expandable. It will grow rapidly, because key stakeholders in the US, Canada and the Middle East are getting very engaged. We’re in deep discussions with several players that can create significant adoption in different markets. The third thing is that we’re starting to see significant third party services providers wanting to inject their services into this network. For example we will soon announce a medical transportation partnership that will offer patients the ability to get from home to the hospital and back in a much more elegant and cost effective way than ambulances and other mechanisms’ and reduce the number of missed appointments that are harmful to both patients and doctors. This integrated transportation capability for people around the world is coming to the wallet and you’ll be able to pay for it using our Solve digital tokens. We’re talking literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of services being accessed by patients using the Care.Wallet.

So you’re one step closer to achieving your visions to transforming healthcare?

Of course, we will expand carefully, step-by-step, as our main goal to always have satisfied clients and excited users while maintaining security and safety of patients and their information. Each day, we get further proof and feedback that reinforces our mission and vision of redefining patient-provider-payer relationship. We are seeing the beginning of a massive shift in how to coordinate, manage and pay for healthcare, in the US and globally. I am sure we will look back a few years from now and ask the question – how did we do things before and why did who do things any other way?

 

 

 

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