Author: Charlie Lougheed

CLEVELAND, October 5, 2020 – Axuall, University Hospitals, MetroHealth System, and Hyr Medical will present the phase 2 results of the digital credential pilots at NAMSS 2020 Conference​ from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT Thursday, October 8, 2020 during the Lightning Learning Presentations.
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During the presentation, Charlie Lougheed, Trish Gallagher, Janna Kennedy, and Dr. Faris El-Khider will cover four areas. ​The first explores healthcare trends that drive the need for medical staff to address the increasing demand for speed and efficiency during the onboarding process. The group will describe some new technologies, including digital credentials, issuer signatures, and blockchain, and discuss how this fits into workflows and bylaws. Janna, Trish, and Dr. El-Khider will share what each of their organizations learned during their pilots. And finally, the group will discuss what is in store for the future for this technology.

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Janna Kennedy is the Director of Medical Staff Services, Credentialing, and Provider Enrollment for University Hospitals. University Hospitals is an integrated network of 18 hospitals, 40 outpatient health centers, and 200 physician offices throughout northern Ohio.

Trish Gallagher is the Director of Professional Affairs at The MetroHealth System, where she oversees all aspects of credentialing, GME, and Provider enrollment. MetroHealth is a nationally ranked non-profit public health care system in Cuyahoga County with four hospitals, 20 health centers, and a network of over 1,200 physicians and advanced practice providers.
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Dr. Faris El-Khider is the co-Founder & Chief Clinical Officer of Hyr Medical, a network of over 800 physicians bringing the gig economy to healthcare.
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To learn more about the NAMSS, the NAMSS 44th Educational Virtual Conference, please click here.

About Axuall, Inc.

Formed in 2018, Axuall, Inc. addresses the national imperative to improve access to quality healthcare by helping to eliminate unnecessary inefficiencies in workforce deployment. Axuall is a national digital network that enables clinicians, healthcare systems, and primary source institutions to share and manage authenticated credentials in real-time. With this, we empower health systems to accelerate the time-to-deployment of qualified healthcare professionals, while at the same time reducing physician burnout.

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Pilot Establishes Evidence for Strong Potential for Significant Advancements in Credentialing, Privileging, and Payor Enrollment Efficiencies

CLEVELAND, May 19, 2020 – Axuall, Inc. announced today that it has entered into a strategic collaboration and business alliance with University Hospitals to develop and test new mechanisms and workflows to reduce the time it takes to deploy qualified clinical staff and meet growing patient demand. Axuall is a national digital network that enables clinicians, healthcare systems, and primary source institutions to share and manage authenticated credentials in real-time, all while meeting regulatory standards.

Axuall and University Hospitals’ Ventures group began to work together in 2019 to identify opportunities to leverage blockchain and digital identity to fundamentally improve the way the health system attracts, verifies, and deploys clinical talent. Since then, the organizations successfully completed the first of three phases of their pilot in February of 2020. Subsequent phases will support the full set of NCQA and Joint Commission standards and are expected to be completed by midsummer of 2020.

“As U.S. health systems struggle to meet patient demand, expanding delivery channels, and financial objectives, the efficient deployment of their clinical workforce becomes increasingly critical.

Global pandemics, such as COVID-19, only underscore the need for a more elastic workforce and speed to deployment,” stated Axuall CEO, Charlie Lougheed. “We are at the intersection of new advancements in technology and processes that, if applied correctly, can improve organizations’ ability to serve their communities, while at the same time increasing their operating efficiencies.”

The process of verifying physician credentials often takes 3-4 months to complete, a manually intensive set of activities that delay care. Blockchain and digital credential technologies provide the ability to cryptographically ensure that verifications originated from authorized sources and have not been tampered with. This enables organizations to confirm facts without expensive and time-consuming manual intervention. It is for this reason that blockchain is being leveraged to improve healthcare administration, including workforce credentialing, revenue cycle optimization, and medical supply chain safety.

“Any delays in getting clinicians permission to serve our patients put a strain on limited resources, and no more so than when we find ourselves continuously load-balancing in response to COVID-19,” stated David Sylvan, President of UH Ventures. “The time and cost to traditionally credential a practitioner wastes resources – it idles the provider; it stalls vital revenue-producing activities and limits throughput. University Hospitals is excited to pilot Axuall’s novel and potentially game-changing technology.”

During the pilot, the organizations will test and measure compliance, workflow integration, physician adoption, and deployment efficiency gains. Axuall will complete beta testing with University Hospitals and several other health organizations later this year.

About University Hospitals

Founded in 1866, University Hospitals serves the needs of patients through an integrated network of 18 hospitals, more than 50 health centers and outpatient facilities, and 200 physician offices in 16 counties throughout northern Ohio. The system’s flagship academic medical center, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, located in Cleveland’s University Circle, is affiliated with Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The main campus also includes University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, ranked among the top children’s hospitals in the nation; University Hospitals MacDonald Women’s Hospital, Ohio’s only hospital for women; University Hospitals Harrington Heart & Vascular Institute, a high-volume national referral center for complex cardiovascular procedures; and University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center, part of the NCI-designated Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. UH is home to some of the most prestigious clinical and research programs in the nation, including cancer, pediatrics, women’s health, orthopedics, radiology, neuroscience, cardiology and cardiovascular surgery, digestive health, transplantation and urology. UH Cleveland Medical Center is perennially among the highest performers in national ranking surveys, including “America’s Best Hospitals” from U.S. News & World Report. UH is also home to Harrington Discovery Institute at University Hospitals – part of The Harrington Project for Discovery & Development. UH is one of the largest employers in Northeast Ohio with 28,000 physicians and employees. Advancing the Science of Health and the Art of Compassion is UH’s vision for benefitting its patients into the future, and the organization’s unwavering mission is To Heal. To Teach. To Discover. Follow UH on LinkedIn, Facebook @UniversityHospitals and Twitter @UHhospitals. For more information, visit UHhospitals.org.

About Axuall, Inc.

Formed in 2018, Axuall, Inc. addresses the national imperative to improve access to quality healthcare by helping to eliminate unnecessary inefficiencies in workforce deployment. Axuall is a national digital network that enables clinicians, healthcare systems, and primary source institutions to share and manage authenticated credentials in real-time. With this, we empower health systems to accelerate the time-to-deployment of qualified healthcare professionals, while at the same time reducing physician burnout.

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Press Contact

Heather Kramer, HJK Digital, hkramer2011@gmail.com

The Future of Healthcare Technology Roundtable Series assembles insights from five important cohorts; Innovators, Physicians, Executives, Payors and Policy Makers, to discuss emerging trends and opportunities in today’s healthcare environment. We hope to enlighten, inform, and provide thought leadership through this five-part written forum.

Download Document

The Future of Healthcare Technology Roundtable Series assembles insights from five important cohorts; Innovators, Physicians, Executives, Payors and Policy Makers, to discuss emerging trends and opportunities in today’s healthcare environment. We hope to enlighten, inform, and provide thought leadership through this five-part written forum.

Download Document

Solution Leverages Blockchain to Enable Self-Sovereign Digital Identity for Healthcare Professionals

CLEVELAND, February 3, 2020 – Axuall and The MetroHealth System will collaborate to test digital credentials for segments of its physician staff. The pilot will use new technologies and workflows to acquire, manage, and share digital credentials via a nationwide network of practitioners, health systems, and primary source issuers.

When fully deployed, practitioners will hold an up-to-date, reusable, and verified set of digital credentials that will enable a considerably faster and more efficient privileging and payor enrollment process.

The goal will be to apply this technology to standard processes and bylaws to reduce credentialing wait times, improve accuracy, and alleviate practitioner administrative burden. Ultimately this will improve patient access to care by shortening the hiring process for health care systems, especially as delivery channels move beyond brick-and-mortar to telehealth and other innovative approaches.

The Axuall Network leverages blockchain and portable digital wallets to enable secure, real-time sharing and monitoring of credentials. The technology uses biometrics to confirm practitioner identity and protect privacy, enabling practitioners to control how and when their credentials are shared.

These new digital portfolios will include documentation of a practitioner’s education, specialty training and board certifications, licenses, sanctions or medical malpractice judgments, evaluations, work history and hospital affiliations. In short, a verified, instantly accessible professional profile that otherwise might take an employer or accreditation agency weeks or even months to assemble.

“We are thrilled to work with MetroHealth to test, refine, and perfect this technology,” said Charlie Lougheed, Axuall’s CEO. “Reducing unnecessary costs and burdens on practitioners is core to our mission of helping practitioners practice less paperwork and more medicine”.

Axuall was formed in 2018 and raised $3 million in seed capital for R&D in 2019. In December, it began a pilot with Hyr Medical and is expected to announce additional pilots in 2020 as the technology and workflows are perfected and its national network of credential issuing partners grows.

“We are excited to work together with Axuall to bring this innovation to our organization,” said Julie Jacono, MetroHealth Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. “Meeting the needs of our community requires that we reduce the barriers to deploying clinical resources across new geographies and delivery channels.”

About the MetroHealth System

The MetroHealth System is an essential health system committed to providing health care to everyone in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Advancing medical care is only part of what we do. We are driven by the relentless pursuit of healthy, thriving communities for everyone. The health system is home to Cuyahoga County’s most experienced Level I Adult Trauma Center, verified since 1992, and the only adult and pediatric burn center in the state of Ohio.

As an academic medical center, MetroHealth is committed to teaching and research. Each active staff physician holds a faculty appointment at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and its main campus hospital houses a Cleveland Metropolitan School District high school of science and health.

About Axuall, Inc.

Axuall is a digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity in real-time. We address a multibillion-dollar need to eliminate waste, prevent fraud, manage risk, and meet the demand for next-generation products and services in healthcare.

The New Year brings about various resolutions for millions across the globe. For many, that means putting more focus on their physical and mental health. Blockchain’s ability to revolutionize healthcare is undeniable. When applied to healthcare, blockchain is a shared platform that decentralizes health data without compromising the security of sensitive information. For example, patients can potentially use their own signatures, combined with a hospital signature, to unlock data to provide secure access to medical information for use in treatment. Patients could have full control of their medical information, selecting the information they want shared and viewed by providers or doctors. This model lifts the costly burden of maintaining patient’s medical histories away from hospitals. Also, counterfeit medicine is a big issue pharma companies face in their everyday operations since there are many stakeholders involved in the supply chain. Recall of drugs and avoiding counterfeit drugs from entering into legit marketplaces will help in reducing the losses and improving service delivery to the end customer. Blockchain could be used to maintain the entire supply chain in healthcare.

Below is a list of some interesting healthcare applications powered by Hyperledger technology you may or may not have known about:

Axuall – Axuall is a digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity in real-time using the Sorvin Network and Hyperledger Indy. The Axuall network is currently in pilot with Hyr Medical and their 650+ physician network in addition to two other health systems. Physicians’ time is better spent practicing medicine than filling out redundant, repetitive credentialing paperwork consisting of unchanging information. Using Axuall’s digital credentialing network, physicians will be able to present fully compliant credential sets to participating healthcare systems and medical groups they are affiliated with or applying to. Utilizing the cryptographic constructs from Hyperledger Indy, healthcare organizations will be able to verify the validity of a physician’s credentials – spanning medical education, training, licensing, board certification, work history, competency evaluations, sanctions, and adverse events – ensuring compliance with industry standards, regulatory mandates, and health system bylaws.

KitChain – LedgerDomain joined forces with other industry leaders like Pfizer, IQVIA, UPS, Merck, UCLA Health, GSK, Thermo Fisher, and Biogen to build out a pilot on Hyperledger Fabric called KitChain. Scoped and developed over the course of two years, KitChain aims to demonstrate a robust collaborative model for managing the pharmaceutical clinical supply chain, creating an immutable record for shipment and event tracking without the need to resort to paperwork and manual transcription. KitChain has two major components: a frontend mobile application and a backend blockchain server. The backend was implemented in Golang and used Hyperledger Fabric, the LedgerDomain Selvedge blockchain app platform, and LedgerDomain’s DocuSeal framework, encompassing smart contracts and application logic. As such, the pilot has a fully functioning highly secure blockchain backend.

MELLODDY Project – This drug discovery project uses Amazon Web Services technologies to execute Machine Learning algorithms from academic partners on a large scale. The data never leaves the owner’s infrastructure and only non-sensitive models are exchanged. A central dispatcher allows each partner to share a common model to be consolidated collectively. To provide full traceability of the operations, the platform is based on a private blockchain and uses Substra, a software framework for orchestrating distributed machine learning tasks in a secure way. Substra is based on Hyperledger Fabric. MELLODDY is designed to prevent the leaking of proprietary information from one data set to another or through one model to another while at the same time boosting the predictive performance and applicability domain of the models by leveraging all available data. The MELLODDY consortium consists of 17 partners:

• 10 pharmaceutical companies: Amgen, Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, GSK, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Merck KgaA, Novartis, and Institut de Recherches Servier
• Two academic universities: KU Leuven, Budapesti Muszaki es Gazdasagtudomanyi Egyetem
• Four subject matter experts: Owkin, Substra Foundation, Loodse, Iktos
• One large AI computing company: NVIDIA

MyClinic.com – Medicalchain was one of the first healthcare blockchain companies to join the Hyperledger community, signing on as a member in 2017. The company’s ethos is to empower patients to have access to their medical records. Providing patients with direct access to their data unlocks the barriers we face in healthcare today such as patient choice and interoperability issues. A doctor-led team based in the UK, Medicalchain trialled the first telemedicine consultation using blockchain technology. The company’s first blockchain-based product to market, MyClinic.com, makes it easy to schedule appointments, review priligy medical reports and request further investigations or assistance using an Android and iOS app. Now the company is set to focus on scalability with the view to onboarding clinics and patients locally, nationally and internationally.

Verified.Me – SecureKey launched its innovative and in-demand network to Canadian consumers in early 2019. Verified.Me is a blockchain-based digital identity network built upon Hyperledger Fabric 1.2 that enables consumers to stay in control of their information by choosing when to share information and with whom, reducing unnecessary oversharing of personal information. Sun Life Financial has signed on as an early adopter and the first North American (health) insurer, making it easier for their clients to do business with the company. Dynacare, one of Canada’s largest and most respected providers of health and wellness solutions, has joined the Verified.Me network. Dynacare’s participation will make it easier for Canadians to verify their identities as well as gain safer and faster access to their health information.

Curious about blockchain and advances in healthcare? Contribute to the conversation by joining the Hyperledger Healthcare Special Interest Group (HC-SIG). Open to anyone, the SIG was created to offer healthcare professionals and technologists a forum to discuss the implementation of technology solutions using blockchain technologies in general like Hyperledger frameworks and toolsets in specific.

Axuall, Inc. today announced that it has successfully completed a System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2® Type I Audit examination for their Identify and Credential Verification System. Axuall, Inc. retained international business advisory firm Skoda Minotti for its SOC 2® audit work. Axuall, Inc. selected Skoda Minotti after an intensive search based on their reputation as a leading risk advisory and compliance firm.

Ben Osbrach, CISSP, CISA, QSA, CICP, CCSFP, partner-in-charge of Skoda Minotti’s cyber and risk advisory group says, “We were excited to work with Axuall from the very start. They are an intriguing organization delivering high-quality services and their business adds to our growing SOC reporting practice.”

SOC 2® engagements are performed in accordance with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) AT-C 205, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization and based on the trust service principles outlined in the AICPA Guide, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization Relevant to Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, or Privacy. The SOC 2® Type I report is performed by an independent auditing firm and is intended to provide an understanding of the service organization’s suitability of the design of its internal controls. A service organization may select any or all of the trust service principles applicable to their business and Axuall chose to report on security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. The successful completion of this voluntary engagement illustrates Axuall’s ongoing commitment to create and maintain a secure operating environment for their clients’ confidential data.

Skoda Minotti’s testing of Axuall’s controls included examination of their policies and procedures regarding network connectivity, firewall configurations, systems development life cycle, computer operations, logical access, data transmission, backup and disaster recovery, and other critical operational areas of their business. Upon completion of the audit, Axuall received a Service Auditor’s Report with an unqualified opinion demonstrating that their policies, procedures, and infrastructure meet or exceed the stringent SOC 2® criteria.

The successful completion of our SOC 2® examination audit provides Axuall’s subscribers and partners with the assurance that the controls and safeguards we employ to protect and secure their data are in line with industry standards and best practices,” said Charlie Lougheed, Axuall CEO.

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About Axuall, Inc.

Axuall is a digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity in real-time. We address a multibillion-dollar need to eliminate waste, prevent fraud, manage risk, and meet the demand for next-generation products and services in healthcare.

About – Skoda Minotti

Skoda Minotti is a Certified Public Accounting Firm based in Cleveland, OH offering a variety of tax, finance, and business advisory services in virtually every area of business. The Risk Advisory practice specializes in SOC Reporting, PCI DSS Compliance, HIPAA Compliance and HITRUST validation, FISMA, NIST, ISO 27001, Vulnerability and Penetration Testing, and other regulatory information security assessments. Staffs in Skoda Minotti’s Risk Advisory hold several industry certifications including Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Qualified Security Assessor (QSA), GIAC Penetration Tester (GPEN), and GIAC Web Application Penetration Tester (GWAPT). For more information about Skoda Minotti’s Risk Advisory Services, please visit skodaminotti.com/risk.

San Francisco, JPMorgan Healthcare Conference: Alliance addresses the billion-dollar challenge of balancing workforce demands with rising standards for placing qualified healthcare practitioners.

Axuall, Inc. and Hyr Medical, Inc. announced today that the companies are engaged in a pilot to test and implement portable digital credentials across portions of Hyr Medical’s 650+ physician network. By leveraging Axuall’s national network of primary source credential issuers, physicians will be able to present fully compliant credential sets to participating healthcare systems and medical groups for which they apply to via the Hyr platform. Supported credential types include medical education, training, licensing, board certification, work history, competency evaluations, sanctions, and adverse events; credentials commonly required to meet industry standards, regulations, and health system bylaws.

Regulations require healthcare employers and health plans to credential practitioners upon hire and periodically after that – a process that takes significant operating expense and anywhere from 3 to 6 months to complete. This process often must be repeated for each additional care setting for which a physician is deployed. Meanwhile, qualified physicians wait to start work, patients wait for care, and healthcare systems lose money.

“Together, the Hyr and Axuall technologies will play complementary roles in reducing unnecessary costs and time to place qualified physicians into much-needed positions,” stated Charlie Lougheed, Axuall’s CEO. “We expect to learn a great deal during this pilot as we observe how this technology reshapes workflows and improves efficiencies.”

The streamlined placement of qualified healthcare professionals, aided by secure digital credentials, offers the potential to save the U.S. healthcare system billions annually while improving efficiency, accuracy, privacy, and security. Hyr Medical’s online network enables qualified physicians and healthcare systems to directly connect for freelance (“locum tenens”), telehealth and permanent jobs. Leveraging patent pending blockchain technology, Axuall’s network enables physicians to acquire digital versions of their credentials from authorized issuers such as medical schools, residency programs, license bureaus, and medical boards, and then share them securely with healthcare systems and medical groups instantly.

“As the U.S. healthcare system grapples with the challenges of meeting the growing demand for care coupled with the disparity in physician density between metro and rural locations, healthcare employers are looking for new ways to attract, engage and deploy practitioners” stated Hyr Medical CEO, Manoj Jhaveri. “We expect new models like on-demand freelancing, telehealth and faster placement to play a significant role in addressing these challenges. Technologies like Axuall and Hyr will enable these advancements.”

The pilot will also study the experience of the practitioners as they acquire, manage, and share their digital credentials with employers (i.e., their “digital wallet”). Data will be collected to better understand how the technologies improve workflow, reduce redundancy, and create empowering experiences for physicians. Building upon this momentum, Axuall has recently begun separate pilots with two health systems, with more details to be announced shortly.

“Having participated in Axuall’s early testing, I am encouraged by the potential that this technology has to greatly improve the painful credentialing process that exists today” stated Laura Dewitt, MD/MBA and Anesthesiologist. “Physicians’ time is better spent practicing medicine over filling out repetitive paperwork which often consists of unchanging information previously verified multiple times in the past. We recognize that credentialing is essential to quality and safety, and streamlining the processes will improve healthcare for practitioners, healthcare organizations and patients alike.”

About Axuall

Axuall is a digital verification company that is changing the way organizations and individuals attest to and verify facts. Powered by leading edge technology, the Axuall network provides a streamlined approach to validating assertions and managing static and dynamic proofs within a tamperproof digital ledger; forming the basis of new economy that rewards verifiers while reducing cost, risk and inefficiency for organizations that subscribe to this information. For more info, please visit www.axuall.com and follow @axuall on Twitter.

About Hyr Medical

Hyr Medical has created an online marketplace that eliminates the agency middle man and reduces overhead costs. We enable direct connections between Practitioners and Healthcare Systems/Groups, automate portions of the credentialing process, and provide upfront transparency into rates and practice locations. The result is significantly faster credentialing, lower costs for Healthcare Systems/Groups, significantly higher rates for Physicians, and a system that finally attracts and rewards quality, Freelance Practitioners. For more info, please visit www.hyrmed.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

The Future of Healthcare Technology Roundtable Series assembles insights from five important cohorts; Innovators, Physicians, Executives, Payors and Policy Makers, to discuss emerging trends and opportunities in today’s healthcare environment. We hope to enlighten, inform, and provide thought leadership through this five-part written forum.

Download Document

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