PNC is one of seven healthcare-related organizations committing $50 million of initial funding to Avaneer Health, a fully interoperable, participant-based network developed for and by the healthcare industry.
Within the U.S. healthcare system, challenges to achieving real, fluid data interoperability persist. These challenges can result in excessive administrative costs, delays in providing care, and patient frustration. According to The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S. healthcare spending grew 9.7% in 2020, reaching $4.1 trillion, or $12,530 per person.[1] This is forecasted to grow to $6.2 trillion by 2028.[2] Additionally, addressing data-flow inefficiencies in healthcare could help in a variety of ways and save tens of billions of dollars annually.
PNC collaborated with other organizations to create Avaneer Health to help clear these obstacles and to design solutions that increase healthcare interoperability and patient satisfaction.
“Every day, we see negative human impacts and unnecessarily high administrative costs persist across our healthcare system,” said Stuart Hanson, founding CEO of Avaneer Health. “These are due, in large part, to disconnected data silos and technology barriers to the type of data fluidity we have all come to expect in other industries. We are very excited to enable healthcare organizations to work together more efficiently with a foundation of trust to solve the ‘last mile’ problem in healthcare. Avaneer Health’s group of well-known industry backers have given us meaningful capital, scale and a strong knowledge base from launch, positioning us for additional growth and investment in 2022.”
We are very excited to enable healthcare organizations to work together more efficiently with a foundation of trust to solve the ‘last mile’ problem in healthcare.
—Stuart Hanson, Founding CEO of Avaneer Health
Through a single connection to Avaneer Health, network participants will have access to a range of solutions for securely transacting and administering healthcare and for streamlining processes. The platform can help enable more expedient access to care while enhancing the consumer experience, reducing administrative waste and improving outcomes. Participants may also gain increased consumer loyalty, lower physician burnout, and reduced technology and operational costs.
The administrative functions of healthcare are fraught with inefficiencies and unnecessary costs. For example, coverage, eligibility, prior authorization, claim payments and other administrative functions each require information exchange between multiple parties, often with many point-to-point connections. Even with all these connections, patients and their families can experience delays in care, manual processes to share clinical information, incorrect patient bills and more. An interoperable infrastructure that allows for data sharing between multiple parties via a single connection, comparable to what’s available in the financial services industry, is needed for healthcare.
Avaneer Health is leveraging blockchain, leading technologies, and industry standards to create a nationwide network infrastructure through which healthcare organizations, patients and other key stakeholders can access accurate information in real time. This “internet for healthcare” serves as a health utility network and eliminates the need for multiple point-to-point connectivity by creating an environment of “connect once to many.”
As a blockchain-enabled network, Avaneer Health has a verifiable trust layer for joint processes between participants on the network. Because of that agreed upon, verifiable trust function, counter-party risk of data sharing can be significantly reduced. Each participant on the blockchain knows, with a certified verification, that the other parties are "good actors" and agree to interact with each other using built-in, automatically enforced standards. No other intermediary is needed to guarantee the integrity of the data or transaction.
The Avaneer Health network shifts the need to exchange data by facilitating data access. The switch from exchanging to accessing gives providers, payers and other healthcare stakeholders the ability to know demographic, coverage, eligibility, clinical, payment and other actionable information automatically and in real time. Furthermore, innovative solutions can be efficiently deployed and accessed on the network, equipped by marketplace functionalities to enable faster monetization and adoption.
By enabling every party associated with a patient’s care to have timely access to accurate data, there can be significant reduction in care delays, medical errors, duplicate testing and so much more —including cost of care. For the revenue cycle, this can mean that payers, providers and collaborators, such as PNC, will have real-time data to significantly decrease fraudulent claims, claim rejections and delayed reimbursements. The potential cost reduction from eliminating waste, removing administrative burdens and improving the industry’s overall efficiency can be significant.
PNC: Founding Member, Active Innovator
PNC recognizes the opportunity Avaneer Health provides to reimagine the business of healthcare and views it as a natural extension of our existing healthcare business.
In addition to our founding and investment activities, PNC is also actively collaborating in the design and development of business applications that will help Avaneer Health advance the seamless, secure exchange of information and payments between organizations participating in Avaneer Health’s blockchain network.
Helping Power Secure Payments
PNC will be enabling the seamless integration of payment capabilities for apps deployed on the Avaneer Health network. We will support B2B and B2C payments by leveraging existing off-chain payment rails, including ACH, wire and Real-Time Payments®. Providing this flexibility can help solution developers to meet a broad range of customer payment needs with minimal coding effort.
By leveraging the power of blockchain on the Avaneer Health network, we see an opportunity to materially reduce costs while also improving the quality of data being exchanged. With the Avaneer Health infrastructure, we can create an improved consumer experience and more efficiency in healthcare for all stakeholders. PNC looks forward to creating innovative solutions that support Avaneer Health’s mission of delivering a participant-based, inclusive, secure network designed for and by healthcare leaders to drive efficiencies and optimize healthcare delivery and patient satisfaction.
To learn more about how we can bring ideas, insight and solutions to you, please contact your Relationship Manager or fill out a simple Contact Form, and we’ll get in touch with you.
Authors: Mary Butler-Everson, PNC; Tom Walsh, PNC; Ray Jebsen, Avaneer Health
