Healthcare giants Aetna Inc., a subsidiary of CVS Health, and Ascension, the largest non-profit health system in the United States, announced Monday that both companies have joined a distributed ledger blockchain pilot program aimed at improving data quality for healthcare providers run by the Synaptic Health Alliance.

By joining the pilot program, Aetna and Ascension join ranks with Humana Inc., MultiPlan Inc., Quest Diagnostics Inc. and UnitedHealth Group Inc.’s Optum and UnitedHealthcare.

The objective of the pilot is to build a directory network of data about healthcare providers with up-to-date information made available for customers and other members of the network. The pilot uses blockchain technology to form an easily accessible, trustworthy and distributed database of information designed to lower administration costs and increase availability.

Federal and state regulations require that health plans sold to the public maintain directories containing basic information about doctors and other health care providers. According to data collected by Health Plan Weekly, a healthcare market analysis publication, the industry spends $2.1 billion a year across the health care system collecting and maintaining this data.

“Everyone in this industry has been dreaming of interoperability for a long time. Blockchain is a key to that,” said Lidia Fonseca, chief information officer at Quest Diagnostics. “Better quality data leads to better decision-making, better patient care and experiences – that’s the promise of what this alliance hopes to deliver.”

The blockchain pilot launched in April and is now exploring how blockchain technology can be integrated into the healthcare industry. It’s estimated by the alliance that such technology can deliver up to $1.5 billion in savings by helping reduce duplicate effort, prevent human error and protect against “bad actors” inserting fraudulent information.

According to a review completed last year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a regulatory body that also hands out fines for delayed claims and incorrect information, found that 52 percent of provider directory locations listed had at least one inaccuracy.

The Synaptic Health Alliance published a white paper, “Improving Provider Data Accuracy: A Collaborative Approach Using a Permissioned Blockchain,” that outlines the pilot’s scope and vision, including potential solutions within the industry such as for longitudinal health records, asset tracking, managing and exchanging data and process automation.

Blockchain technology has seen increasing use for healthcare innovation in the past year. In February, data aggregation and analytics company ODH Inc. and healthcare blockchain provider Hashed Health teamed up to build a patient care and billing blockchain.

Health Wizz Inc., a patient-centric health documents blockchain, upgraded its network and announced a hospital pilot program aimed at improving patient outcomes after hospitalization. In August, Anthem Inc., a national healthcare benefits company, partnered with blockchain-based artificial intelligence platform Doc.ai Inc. to develop a data trial designed to predict when allergies might strike.

According to Synaptic, the current healthcare directory systems cost so much because the aforementioned laws and regulations require constant updates. This leads to a great deal of administrative overhead and tends to duplicate work across the industry due to multiple data silos designed to contain the same information.

The alliance is currently seeking more participants across the healthcare industry and plans to review data gathered from its pilot program running over the summer to determine what direction to take with its current membership.

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