The launch of a new healthcare payment network, powered by blockchain technology, was announced on Saturday, July 14th by HealthCombix, Inc., in Nashville Tennessee. HCX PAY, the new public payment blockchain, and node operator network will be entirely focused on payment confidentiality. The company has promised improved user experiences, activity-based payments, and ultimately a lower cost of transaction fees globally.
HealthCombix Inc. CEO, Cyrus Maaghul, cites the new payment network as a “huge market opportunity for low/no cost payment solutions.” Visa and Oxford Economics predict that the cross-border healthcare transaction market will reach a value of $3.4 trillion by 2025, putting HealthCombix in an ideal position to grow financially within that very market, as the company’s announced aim is to support a wide variety of transactions, including those made internationally.
“We believe HCX PAY can bring the world a better and cheaper way to pay and consumer healthcare services when traveling to foreign jurisdictions,” Maaghul said of the network’s potential to affect the average consumer.
Also, the company’s technology could serve to reduce public sector spending, as it will provide for a less expensive way “for governments [to pay for] sovereign citizens’ medical expenses abroad.”
Maaghul intends for the first phase of the payment solution to significantly reduce costs for patients and enterprises. It is not abnormal for cross-border medical bills to be extremely high in comparison to domestic medical bills, especially for cancer treatment and surgery. For that reason, the HCX payment network will provide for the authentication and integration of cross-border bundling platforms with the HCX PAY network and exchanges.
HCX PAY has committed in full to the preservation of the privacy of its users, and it has designed and included the necessary features to ascertain an unprecedented degree of confidentiality for stakeholders. Due to the strength of the company’s privacy technology, it is practically impossible for a patient or commercial payments to be tracked by third-parties.
The project’s second phase will entail new payment and data capabilities such as asset swaps for event-driven payments and bundled or wrap-around payments.
With its announcement, HealthCombix joins a slew of other companies moving to take advantage of a transaction market traditionally mired by high cross-border fees on patient-provider payments. By developing advanced cryptocurrency networks that can drive down transaction costs while simultaneously promising a higher degree of privacy and security on each individual exchange that can be traditionally expected, the development of blockchain technology for payment networks in the health industry is an area to watch.
In fact, as soon as August of this year, Teledactyl, a health tech company based out of Wyoming, is scheduled to make its own major announcement concerning a payment system powered by blockchain technology. Co-founder of Teledactyl, Dr. Seth Crapp, has presented his company’s project with an emphasis on bettering the patient-provider relationship and allowing patients immediate access to their medical records via access to the network.
In addition to Teledactyl’s concentration on improving patient-provider relationships and fixing bureaucratic lag endemic to healthcare in the U.S., the company promises similarly enhanced user experiences and commitments to privacy that have been integral to HealthCombix’s model.
At the moment, all entities within the healthcare industry are being invited to reserve an HCX node to experiment with HealthCombix’s new applications. “This is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to enabling the development of new and existing blockchain technology applications to create new and exciting efficiencies,” said Maghuul of the chance for enterprises, practitioners, individuals, and service providers to get in on the ground floor with the company. HCX PAY is being marketed to all of the major global health systems for entities in search of lower cost payments and more privacy.
The overhaul of patient-provider payment systems in the healthcare industry by blockchain technology is still in its infancy. Much of the technology and infrastructure produced by these companies was practically non-existent prior to their entrances into the field, and thus they should be expected to serve as early contributors to the rapid development of blockchain technology in the health industry. Companies like HealthCombix and Teledactyl are surely just the beginning of what will likely be a long list of health tech startups and entrepreneurs looking to fix healthcare payment networks in the U.S., while simultaneously driving down transaction fees and revolutionizing patient privacy and payment security.