Curisium wins funding to develop blockchain for medical payments
Following a $3.5m seed fund investment, blockchain start-up Curisium has announced plans to develop its blockchain platform for healthcare payments. Curisium's platform uses blockchain technology to enable payers, providers and life science companies to engage in value-based contracts for patients. The investors from this round included Flare Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Green Bay Ventures. Curisium CEO Peter Kim said he hopes to further encourage healthcare stakeholders toward alternative payment methods by using blockchain to get around implementation obstacles caused by "costly logistics, lack of trust and difficulty verifying patient-level outcomes".

Curisium announced that it has raised $3.5 million in seed financing to advance its blockchain platform for healthcare.

With nearly one-third of the payments in the $2.7 trillion U.S. healthcare market already tied to some form of alternative payment model, the company said it will use the investment to advance its technology.

The Curisium platform deploys blockchain and secure computation technologies to allow payers, providers and life science companies to engage in patient-centric value-based contracts.

[Also: Blockchain beyond EHRs: Transforming value-based payment, precision medicine, patient-centric care]

Healthcare organizations and innovative upstarts initially saw big promise in blockchain’s interoperability, privacy and security, even the the possibility of transforming electronic health record software because the digital ledger technology can, in theory, grant patients more control over their own medical data. And more recently proponents have been saying it could also be used in the pharmacy supply chain to establish a chain-of-custody log that would make it harder for substandard and fraudulent drugs to make their way to market.

Those same characteristics enable similar opportunities for value-based care.

"Payers, providers, and life science companies are increasingly entering into various forms of innovative contracts," said Peter Kim, co-founder and CEO of Curisium. "However, effective implementation today is hampered by costly logistics, lack of trust, and difficulty verifying patient-level outcomes."

[Also: The next big thing in pharmacy supply chain: Blockchain]

Curisium investors in this round include Flare Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Shuttle Fund, Sanofi Ventures and Green Bay Ventures.

Flare Capital co-founder Bill Geary said that by enabling outcome verification at the individual level, the technology could be a foundation for more innovative contracting in the future.

Greg Papadopoulos, venture partner at NEA and former CTO of Sun Microsystems, said it breaks down silos in healthcare with “unique cryptographic guarantees” around its data access.

Papadopoulos and Sanofi chief data officer Milind Kamkolkar joined Curisium's inaugural Industry Advisory Board while Geary and Mohamad Makhzoumi of NEA joined the Curisium board of directors.

Twitter: @JELagasse

Email the writer: jeff.lagasse@himssmedia.com