Clearinghouses are the intermediary platform for data transfers between payers and providers, ensuring that providers are paid for their services. Change Healthcare is one of the most important clearinghouses in the United States, as they process half of all medical claims and serve over 900,000 physicians.
This past February, Change Healthcare clearinghouse experienced a cyberattack that caused an outage that paused operations for several weeks. The inability to submit medical claims resulted in millions of dollars worth of transactions being unable to be paid. Concerns were raised about the efficiency and security of the current clearinghouse system.
Decentralization is a potential tactic to ensure that clearinghouses are not prevented from ensuring these payments are fulfilled. If a single clearinghouse were to suffer from an outage, other clearinghouses should be able to provide the necessary information with uninterrupted processing. Every large healthcare system should use redundant payer systems to stay operation in the case of a clearinghouse outage.
Source: Orbit Healthcare
