Explore Common Q&A
Hopefully this clears some things up.
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General Questions
What is MediLedger?
MediLedger is an innovative platform for data alignment and transaction settlement between pharma Manufacturers, Wholesalers, GPOs, and Health Systems.Powered by a secure and compliant blockchain,
MediLedger enables real-time contract pricing and customer eligibility alignment between trading partners to eliminate chargeback errrors and reduce revenue leakage.
What is Chronicled?
Chronicled is the technology company that developed MediLedger in collaboration with leading companies in the life sciences industry. Chronicled provides improvements to the network itself and develops the solutions, run by participants, on top of the network.
What is the Contracts & Chargebacks Module?
The Contracts & Chargebacks Module gives manufacturers, wholesalers and GPOs a unified view of:
Clean/validated GPO membership
Customer identifiers (HIN, DEA, 34B, etc…)
Pricing contracts
With this data aligned, MediLedger can then enforce chargeback business rules against pricing contracts in real-time, ensuring chargeback and pricing accuracy.
Business Questions
What will the contracts and chargebacks process look like for suppliers on MediLedger?
Through MediLedger, suppliers receive GPO roster updates in real-time, pre-validated against aligned customer identity data like HIN, DEA and 340B.
Suppliers can then use their MediLedger node to automate customer evaluation against the aligned roster and identity data, and generate proposals for new/existing customers to be added to existing systems.
Validation of contract updates shared through MediLedger enables wholesalers to more quickly load contract updates, ensuring suppliers have better insight into pricing being offered by wholesalers to their customers.
When wholesalers go to submit chargebacks, MediLedger enforces accuracy of the chargeback data against the latest state of the contract. For returns, credits, contract backdating and other resubmission scenarios MediLedger automates resubmissions and maintains accuracy against the contract and the original chargebacks.
Why should a pharmaceutical supplier join MediLedger?
For pharmaceutical suppliers, the current contracting and chargebacks process requires extensive manual/duplicate effort, carries unnecessary compliance risk, and results in revenue leakage.
Suppliers who join the network see massive time savings by eliminating/improving manual processes like resolving chargeback errors, evaluating new customers, managing GPO membership and auditing customer master data.
Suppliers also see a large reduction in revenue leakage from the elimination of unapproved deductions/unresolved chargeback settlements, incorrect chargeback approvals, credits/returns incorrectly rejected as duplicates and low dollar chargebacks under the threshold for review.
Other benefits include the elimination of unnecessary add/re-bills for improved customer service, more accurate government pricing based on chargeback data, reduced compliance risk from real-time adherence to the DEA database, immediate contract activation and (for generic suppliers) increased sales from faster price changes in wholesaler systems.
Why is Cardinal Health participating in the MediLedger Network?
Cardinal’s goal is to provide the best service to both customers and suppliers. Today, pricing errors and re-bills create manual effort for everyone involved. With contract updates shared through the MediLedger Network, Cardinal can load updates into their system faster and ensure the right price is given to the right customer.
Through supplier business rules, enforced by the MediLedger Network, Cardinal can get real-time feedback on chargeback accuracy and resolve errors proactively, rather than the back and forth communication that occurs today.
How does a supplier get started?
To get started suppliers just need to speak with a member of the Chronicled team who can explain commercial terms and then provide login information right away for suppliers to get started with easy web access. Chronicled offers a subscription based solution.
For the full solution with integrations to revenue management systems, suppliers can discuss with the Chronicled team the best path forward based on available resources. Deployment of the full solution can take anywhere from a couple weeks to 2-3 months.
IT Questions
What is blockchain and how is it involved?
Blockchain is a mechanism to enforce business rules automatically between participants.
Every participant in a blockchain network has a copy of the blockchain data and the rules being enforced on that data (See Question 9 below for more information on data privacy on a blockchain network). No single party can change the data or the rules. This creates trust between trading partners that was never possible before now.
An example business rule enforced by the network might be:Manufacturer A requires that every chargeback submitted by wholesaler B has an active customer HIN that matches an eligible customer HIN on the contract
How is data privacy maintained in MediLedger?
Contract and chargeback data is extremely sensitive, and is only meant to be shared between relevant trading partners. The MediLedger blockchain is unique in how it facilitates business rule enforcement while maintaining complete data privacy.
On the MediLedger Network, contract updates, chargebacks and other sensitive data are not published directly on the blockchain, instead business rules are enforced against cryptographic proofs (zero knowledge proofs) of the data, published on the blockchain instead of the data itself.
Every company in the network running a node has a copy of the blockchain to facilitate rule enforcement across the industry, but zero business intelligence is leaked through the blockchain. This is the true differentiator and strength of the MediLedger Network.
How does MediLedger relate to my revenue management system?
Revenue Management systems (like Model N or Vistex) or other existing systems remain the source of truth for customers and contracts. The MediLedger Network compliments revenue systems by automating the manual processes related to membership management It further validates and communicates contracts & pricing from manufacturer to wholesaler.
By integrating your revenue system with the MediLedger Network, processes like evaluating new customers, auditing customer master data and resolving chargeback errors can all be dramatically improved or even eliminated through the MediLedger Network.
How is MediLedger related to EDI?
The MediLedger Network replaces EDI messages like 845, 844 and 849.
The problem with EDI is that there is no ability to enforce business rules, and it is typically a one directional mechanism for data transfer. Trading partners have to reconcile and process whatever they receive through EDI, creating manual processing, misalignment and delays across the industry.
Everything on the MediLedger Network is validated and shared in real-time, and allows for enforcement of business rules. Participants now have control over the data and transactions they receive from trading partners
What sort of IT resources are required to implement MediLedger?
MediLedger has opportunities for suppliers to begin participating and get value, without any IT resources required. Suppliers can get simple web access with clean GPO rosters from their existing GPO partners as well as the complete HIN, DEA and 340B identity databases updated live.
For the complete solution, pre-built connectors exist for easy integrations with existing revenue management systems to pull customer and contract data into the MediLedger Network to align with trading partners.