What They’re Watching: Morris Pettit, Turnleaf

Morris Pettit is the Founder of Turnleaf. He joins us in this edition of “What They’re Watching” to discuss using blockchain for credentialing.

“Everybody’s heard of blockchain and I think there’s some misconceptions, misperceptions about blockchain because of Bitcoin and all that’s happened. There’s been a lot of failure around this, but the technology is actually very simple. But what it does is it takes information, distributes it, and it keeps it safe. But it also makes it an immutable record so that nobody can grab this information that’s out there in a lot of different places. And so, particularly with credentials, you have a single point of truth for that credential, for that physician or that health care professional. So, we’re really excited about tackling this really tough problem that’s been going on in health care for a long time.

There’s a tremendous amount of administrative inefficiencies around the credentialing. Any physician you talk with they’ll say, “man, I just I really have some issues here with my credentialing.” And so what this does is it allows a single, almost like a wallet, for that physician to be able to share that set of credentials to a payer or to a provider. And it sometimes takes two to three months before a physician can be credentialed and actually begin practicing with that employer, with that provider. So, this will collapse that time — it could take hours, maybe a day or two, instead of taking weeks and months. So, it really helps that physician manage it well and to get back into the exam room quickly.”