UC San Diego Health Demonstrates New QR Code Standard For Health Insurance Cards

At this week's Digital Health Symposium, UC San Diego's Christopher Longhurst, MD, pulled a QR code from a phone's digital wallet, scanned it at a check-in kiosk, and immediately saw the information pop up and be verified. . Real-time health insurance, including co-pay rates.

The UC San Diego Digital Health Symposium was the first demonstration of the SMART QR code initiative for health insurance cards -; A new model for digitizing and updating health insurance cards, streamlining patient enrollment and reducing payment errors. UC San Diego Health is the first health care system in the country to pilot this new system.

There are over 1,000 health insurance companies in the United States, each with their own insurance card format. It takes weeks to train new employees to deal with all these different card formats, and typographical errors are common, which can result in insurance claims being denied. A common QR code format to scan simplifies the process, reduces errors and simplifies insurance documentation for our patients and staff.

Christopher Longhurst, executive director and director of digital technology at UC San Diego Health

While many health insurance companies have recently issued their own digital ID cards, there hasn't been a common requirement for providers to easily scan or receive this information. until now.

The new SMART Health Card is based on the SMART Health Card QR code standard, which was adopted by most government health and technology ecosystems for immunization records during the Covid-19 pandemic. Healthcare providers and insurance companies, as well as mobile and technology platforms.

The SMART Health Insurance Card initiative was created by the Commons Project, a coalition of public and private partners that developed the SMART Health Card standard in collaboration with the CARIN Alliance and VCI.

The new SMART Health Card initiative was endorsed in April by the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), a nonpartisan professional organization representing 100,000 healthcare financial management professionals nationwide.

"We encourage our healthcare ecosystem peers, payment partners and electronic health record providers to actively participate in the SMART Health Card initiative and adopt the SMART Health Card health insurance card standard," said Senior Vice President Richard L. Gundling. Professional experience at VFM. "We believe the adoption of this standard will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health care services and benefit patients and providers."

The UC San Diego Health Care Symposium, which hosted the demonstration at the Qualcomm Institute, honored Irwin and Joanne Jacobs for their outstanding support of $22 million to expand UC San Diego's Center for Health Innovation. Diego.

Prominent thought leaders from academia and industry will share key insights and initiatives on ethical and safe practices in digital health, including artificial intelligence and machine learning-enabled healthcare innovations, health data-driven mobile care models, and SMART health insurance card issuance.

"UCS Health is a key healthcare decision maker and the SMART Health Card is a great opportunity to demonstrate our ability to improve, think and lead the healthcare ecosystem," said Joshua Glendorf, Chief Information Officer at UCS. "There is strong alignment with these new SMART insurance cards and how we want to advance healthcare in the digital space in general," San Diego Health said.

"This is an exciting phase in our work to simplify health care for the people we serve," said Glen Stettin, MD, Chief Innovation Officer of EverNorth Health Services. "SMART Insurance Cards help patients get the care they need faster and physicians get more efficient payments. Any organization interested in eliminating misunderstandings in healthcare should consider it."

Following today's demonstration, UC San Diego Health, UC Irvine Health, UCLA Health, UCSF Health, UCR Health and UC Davis Health will conduct additional pilot testing of the model.

HFMA is forming a working group of key health care systems across the country to work with payer partners and electronic health record providers to test the model in the coming months. After the pilot projects, the participants will evaluate the results and aim for a wider implementation of the standard and model in the next fiscal year starting in January 2024.

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