One of the figures behind the blockchain R&D effort within the US Health and Human Services (HHS) Department recently spoke out on the tech's potential in Medicare and other public-sector functions.
Speaking with Federal News Radio last week, Debbie Bucci, a lead IT architect for the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), discussed the department's past call for academic papers, which saw more than 70 submissions from a range of sources. She remarked that many of the submissions focused in some way on healthcare administration
Among the possible applications she discussed is using the tech as a publicly viewable layer for U.S. citizens to follow the status of their payments within programs like Medicare or Medicaid.
"For Medicare, Medicaid, maybe the amount you're paying for – I know that for some processes people go in every quarter and they check their payment status, and so it's possible there could be a public ledger that authoritative sources may post to that everyone could collectively use as [a reference] for identifying information and possibly processing the calculations to get there," she told the radio service.
Elsewhere in the interview, Bucci highlighted the technology's possible benefits for record-keeping purposes, telling the Federal News:
Similarly, she indicated, blockchains can be used as a more efficient method of tracking payments made into and out of both systems, either by storing that information on a public ledger, or holding some information and allowing subscribers to calculate their specific costs and benefits more easily.
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The department has not yet pursued any particular blockchain research project, she clarified. At the same time, HHS is staying engaged with the developer community, and Bucci described a recent hackathon at which the winning project focused on the use of blockchain for tracking clinical trial data.
Debbie Bucci image via the Chamber of Digital Commerce