Anthem Will Use Blockchain To Secure Medical Data For Its 40 Million Members In Three Years

Anthem, the second-largest health insurance company in the U.S, has started to use blockchain technology to help patients securely access and share their medical data. The company plans to roll out the feature, which is in pilot testing now, to groups of members in the next few months. All 40 million members will have access to it in the next two to three years, according to company officials.   

“What blockchain potentially gives us the opportunity to do is not worry about those trust issues,” said Anthem CEO Gail Boudreaux at the 8th Annual Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York last week. “We have an opportunity now to share data that people can make their own decisions on.”

Getty Images

Anthem, the second-largest health insurance company in the U.S, has started to use blockchain technology to help patients securely access and share their medical data. The company plans to roll out the feature, which is in pilot testing now, to groups of members in the next few months. All 40 million members will have access to it in the next two to three years, according to company officials.   

“What blockchain potentially gives us the opportunity to do is not worry about those trust issues,” said Anthem CEO Gail Boudreaux at the 8th Annual Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York last week. “We have an opportunity now to share data that people can make their own decisions on.”

In January, Anthem  announced that it was working with Aetna, Health Care Service Corporation, IBM and PNC Bank in a new partnership focused on blockchain. Their goal, says Rajeev Ronanki, chief digital officer at Anthem, is to help keep patient data private while increasing interoperability (the ability of different digital health systems to exchange information) and trust between partners.

Blockchain, made popular by cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is a decentralized database that creates a record of when data is accessed or exchanged. In the healthcare world, this allows companies, especially those that work with medical records, to move patient data securely and cut out redundancies. Executives at Anthem, which has patient medical data based on insurance claims, believe that using blockchain will give patients more immediate access to their records as well as allow them to control who views their health data.