Providence St. Joseph Health, which operates more than 50 hospitals and healthcare facilities in the Western United States, yesterday announced the acquisition of Lumedic, a Seattle-based revenue cycle management company based on blockchain technology.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The healthcare organization said it plans to use the acquisition to reduce inefficiencies in its revenue cycle management platform. The objective is to improve claims processing and interoperability between payers and providers, according to Providence St. Joseph, which is one of the largest employers in Washington state.
“Providence St. Joseph Health has a long history of innovation, and this is an opportunity to ease the transition to patient-driven interoperability while improving operations and diversifying revenue streams,” said Mike Butler, Providence St. Joseph Health president of operations and strategy, in a statement. “The Lumedic platform will reduce administrative burden and enable resources to shift to improved patient care, more patient-centric billing experiences and lower costs.”
Providence St. Joseph said it is the first healthcare organization to use blockchain to build a scalable platform to modernize claims processing. Commonly associated with cryptocurrency bitcoin, blockchain is an incorruptible database that allows multiple parties to securely share data with each other.
Revenue cycle inefficiencies cost the healthcare industry $500 billion in 2018, according to a report from McKinsey & Co., largely due to manual processes.
