Is Virtual Currency Coming To Healthcare?
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Doctors now accepting virtual payments through a controversial digital currency network; is this payment method as great as it sounds?
Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency introduced as open source software in 2009, was designed to make payments easier and more secure by converting dollars into virtual currency for exchange, then converting back into dollars once they’ve reached their destination. The payment method is not without controversy, however.
As Healthcare IT News explains, Bitcoin has been tied to Silk Road, an online black market known for alleged murder-for-hires and narcotics trafficking. Healthcare IT News goes on to explain, however, that Bitcoin is receiving praise for the level of cryptography used and its methods of information exchange. In essence, Bitcoin transactions offer a higher level of privacy than other forms of currency.
Privacy is what originally interested Paul Abramson, M.D., founder of My Doctor Medical Group and a former software programmer, in Bitcoin. Abramson says, "It's important for people to be able to maintain their privacy” and Bitcoin provides a certain level of anonymity that makes it more difficult, yet not impossible, to uncover a user’s personal information.
Abramson also notes, despite his affinity to Bitcoin, “He has nobody with whom he can really do business in bitcoins. His landlord won't take them, and he has asked his employees if they want to be paid in bitcoins, but they have all declined.”
Fierce Health IT explains the site’s technology takes information out of the hands of credit card companies and, as a result, denies those companies access to patient's protected health information (PHI).
John Gomez, M.D., medical director of RapidMed Urgent Care Center in Lewisville, TX, says that none of his current patients use Bitcoin for payment, but they are interested. "It is an abstract concept at first," said Gomez, but "it's really no less foreign than the idea that swiping a credit card is a functional stand-in for exchanging dollar bills."
A Wired article, however, called Coin MD, a website accepting Bitcoins, “the absolute worst place on Earth to spend your Bitcoins.” This type of virtual care, according to Wired, is through people who claim to be doctors but don’t mention the risks of bad information or misdiagnosis. Patients could be getting their information from just about anyone.
In essence, the potential for protecting patient information is promising, but there are currently too many caveats for most physicians to consider using virtual currency. Doctors who have tried the service found it to be “unmagical,” as Abramson put it.