# Verify physician credentials and licenses decentrally

> The TIGER Consortium alongside partners such as Health Care Service Corporation, Hackensack Meridian Health, and Kaiser Permanente piloted a blockchain solution to verify physician credentials. The system allows hospitals, insurers, and diagnostic laboratories to validate medical licenses and certifications across a shared infrastructure. This multi-stakeholder approach aims to significantly reduce administrative onboarding times and credentialing delays for healthcare professionals.

**Sector:** Tertiary sector · **Industry:** Care and social services · **Organisation:** Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), Hackensack Meridian Health, Kaiser Permanente, Multiplan, Optum, Quest Diagnostics, Humedica, UnitedHealth Group, TIGER Consortium (not-for-profit initiative) · **Maturity level:** Pilot

Canonical URL: https://www.sapientblock.com/en/use-cases/health-care-service-corporation-aerztliche-qualifikationen-zulassungen-dezentral

## Documentation status

- **Project status:** Pilot
- **Evidence:** Evidence medium
- **Editorial review:** pending

## Description

The Health Care Service Corporation, together with consortium partners such as Hackensack Meridian Health and Kaiser Permanente, has launched a blockchain pilot to verify physician credentials. In the traditional system, clinics, laboratories and health insurers must painstakingly request qualifications from universities and medical associations individually. The shared register enables all authorised partners to retrieve once-verified evidence tamper-proof and without repeated manual verification loops.

In the US healthcare system, credentialing of doctors often takes up to three months because each institution must separately query licences, specialist titles and liability insurance. To end this inefficient situation, leading organisations such as Optum, UnitedHealth Group, Humedica, Quest Diagnostics, Multiplan, Kaiser Permanente, Hackensack Meridian Health and HCSC have formed the TIGER consortium. The distributed ledger technology-based framework serves as a trusted data layer for cross-institutional exchange of digitally signed credentials. In this way, primary sources can enter qualifications once and release them to verified network participants. This greatly accelerates the start of medical practice and reduces sources of error caused by outdated directory data. The pilot demonstrates the potential of decentralised identity and attestation networks in highly regulated care structures.

## Benefits

- Reduction of administrative personnel and verification effort in clinics
- Faster billing approval of doctors by insurers
- Minimisation of liability risks through comprehensively documented approvals
- Significant shortening of bureaucratic verification times during job changes
- Avoidance of multiple evidence requests from the same primary sources
- Higher reliability and currency of medical register data
- Faster start of work without months of downtime
- Increased transparency about the current status of one's own credentials

## Challenges

- Necessary integration into heterogeneous legacy hospital information systems
- Governance issues regarding responsibility for incorrectly entered attestations
- High coordination requirements for cross-institutional data standards
- Legal hurdles regarding data protection and mutual recognition of digital signatures

## Technology foundation

The solution is based on a permissioned distributed ledger (permissioned blockchain) that serves as an immutable directory for credentials, accreditations and specialist licences. Authorised healthcare institutions can store credentials tamper-proof and validate them mutually in real time.

## Sources

- [AETNA, Anthem & HCSC Partner Up to Bring Blockchain to Healthcare](https://thehealthcaretechnologyreport.com/aetna-anthem-hcsc-partner-up-to-bring-blockchain-to-healthcare/)
- [IBM teams up with Aetna, Anthem, HCSC and PNC Bank to create blockchain-based healthcare ecosystem](https://technologymagazine.com/cloud-and-cybersecurity/ibm-teams-aetna-anthem-hcsc-and-pnc-bank-create-blockchain-based-healthcare-ecosystem)