Quote from: newtothescene on May 11, 2013, 12:14:49 AM

Fraud is one of the biggest areas of concern within healthcare. If we could find ways to reduce fraud, healthcare would be a lot cheaper and more people could have access to it. I like the idea of using transaction logs within the blockchain as a way to verify financial aspects of the exchange. Maybe there could exist a health record blockchain/"coin" that all parties have access to. Since the unique identifiers are anonymous there wouldn't be any risk of HIPAA violations. The same way that transactions are "confirmed" we could do something similar for confirming treatments. Keeps the patients and doctors honest about what they charge. If they only get payed based on confirmed transactions in the log then it would be a whole lot easier to spot fraud this way...

Yeah I think the payment side of healthcare will benefit before the clinical side does. Here's a well written paper on using the blockchain for claims processing. It's written by Humana one of the largest insurers in the US. https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/3-47-whitepaperblockchainforclaims_v10.pdf