Blockspaces Fights Medical Fraud With Healthclear

COVID-19 has certainly changed the way we conduct everyday business. For many employers, dealing with new COVID-19 regulations, guidance, an

Chuck Dyer
June 23, 2020
Blockspaces Fights Medical Fraud With Healthclear

COVID-19 has certainly changed the way we conduct everyday business. For many employers, dealing with new COVID-19 regulations, guidance, and recommendations within the work environment is only the beginning. Employers are responding by taking into account the level of disease transmission in their communities and are revising their business response plans as needed in order to successfully manage the health and safety of their employees while in the workplace. While a vaccine is still in clinical trials for COVID-19 at this time, employers are at the mercy of self-reporting or requiring regular testing of its employees, which can be very difficult to manage.

Recently, an employee provided a doctor’s note to his employer that he had been diagnosed with COVID-19 and was subject to quarantine per CDC and state guidelines. The employer took the necessary steps of notifying all employees of the positive case and added specific notifications to those who had come in direct contact with the COVID positive employee. Additionally, the employer took an added cautionary step of having their warehouse cleaned and disinfected in order to ensure the safe return of its workforce as soon as possible.

What the employer was unaware of was that the doctor’s note was forged. The FBI investigation estimates the company incurred over $175,000 in lost productivity due to the alleged fraud. In addition, one coworker of the alleged victim, believing they had been exposed to the virus, also faced personal financial loss after deciding to pay for a rental property where they could remain self-quarantined away from members of their family.

This is just one case of fraud in relation to employees taking advantage of the pandemic through medical fraud. Rooting out health care fraud is central to the well-being of both our citizens and the economy. Health care fraud costs the United States tens of billions of dollars each year.

BlockSpaces has been working in conjunction with several companies on an HR solution to help companies reduce risk and fraud associated with medical clearances. HealthClearTM utilizes a purpose-built distributed ledger system to create verifiable DID's (Decentralized Identifiers) that are globally unique and resolvable (via a ledger) without requiring any centralized resolution authority. Verifiable Claims are issued as a credential to the end user using a distributed ledger system with Zero Knowledge Proofs which prove that some or all of the data in a set of claims is true without revealing any additional information, including the identity of the end user.

Verifiable digital health clearances that conceal sensitive employee health data would allow employees to return to work after medical leave while mitigating employers’ liability risk and insuring the company’s regulatory compliance. Physician generated releases provide part of the solution, but human errors, inconsistent forms, alterations, and forgeries of information are possible and requests for detailed employee health data by employers runs the risk of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

HealthClearTM is designed to bring trust, personal control, privacy, and ease-of-use for the issuance of health clearance credentials to employees and their physicians, while providing liability protection, consistency and efficiency to HR processes for businesses in order to allow workers to return to work quickly and safely after medical leave.

If you are interested in learning more about HealthClearTM, visit our website at: https://blockspaces.io, or call us to start the conversation.