Will blockchain save the healthcare system?

An unlikely relationship was sparked over box lunches at a tech conference in Nashville. Mike Jacobs, a senior distinguished engineer at the healthcare services company Optum, had been experimenting with how to solve healthcare industry problems with that emerging, exciting, little understood technology called blockchain. He had heard rumors that health insurer Humana, like Optum, had been testing blockchain’s applications.

So during lunch at the Distributed Health conference in September 2017, Jacobs and Humana Lead Enterprise Architect Kyle Culver described their projects in careful terms (there was no nondisclosure agreement in place) and learned that both companies were attempting to use blockchain to improve the accuracy of healthcare provider directories—a perennial, costly issue for the insurance industry. Their...