Presented by Aston
Fraud is rampant. For example, health care fraud in the U.S. is in the tens of billions of dollars, according to various estimates, and that number is growing. While cutting elsewhere, the Trump administration requested $70 million to combat health care fraud in its latest budget, based on the drag on the economy.
“A large hospital creates more than a million sensitive medical documents each month,” says Seungki Kim, CEO at Aston, a blockchain company focusing on document storage and verification. “The documents are vulnerable to tampering, which can lead to fraud. There are also many nearly-identical versions of documents, which can cause confusion and lead to medical errors.
A new form of blockchain technology is the answer.
The cure for fraud
While Harvard Business Review breathlessly announced “The Blockchain Will Do to the Financial System What the Internet Did to Media,” and the Wall Street Journal proclaimed, “The Blockchain Is the Internet of Money” blockchain’s potential extends far beyond finance.
Aston’s initial aim is to use blockchain for document verification, which is the first step to stamping out health care fraud. Aston allows hospitals to issue and confirm medical documents electronically on smartphones and tablets. Each new version of a document is immutably recorded to a secure blockchain, eliminating opportunities for documents to be stolen, manipulated or lost.
“As we move toward decentralized networks for information storage, we also need decentralized document authentication to ensure our documents are legitimate,” Kim said….
