Trace ID Validation via Verifiable Tokens
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Solution Overview
Problem
In healthcare transactions, tracing activities across multiple services is challenging due to the lack of trust in provider-created trace IDs, leading to difficulties in correlating and validating transactions between providers, clearinghouses, and payors, resulting in inefficiencies and loss of transaction status visibility.
Innovation Solution
A method and system for validating and trusting trace IDs by using verifiable tokens such as HMAC or encrypted PKI certificates, allowing the receiving party to authenticate and propagate the trace ID across transactions, ensuring integrity and uniqueness, and enabling tracing from the calling service to the clearinghouse and third parties.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If a provider system creates a transaction with a provider-created trace ID, then the trace ID can be propagated through the network, but the clearinghouse cannot validate the integrity or trustworthiness of the trace ID
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a trust anchor mechanism where the clearinghouse acts as an intermediary that validates trace IDs before accepting them. The clearinghouse maintains a trusted list of valid trace IDs and verifies incoming trace IDs against this list, thereby mediating between the provider's trace ID creation and the clearinghouse's acceptance criteria.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback loops where the clearinghouse provides validation responses to providers about trace ID trustworthiness. This feedback mechanism allows providers to understand which trace IDs are accepted and which are rejected, enabling iterative improvement of trace ID generation and validation processes.
2Reliability
If the clearinghouse creates its own trace ID to ensure trust, then validation integrity is improved, but transaction tracing from original provider to third-party becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the trace ID into multiple components: a provider-generated portion and a clearinghouse-validated portion. This segmentation allows the system to maintain both the original provider's trace ID for backward compatibility and a separate validation mechanism that ensures trustworthiness without losing the ability to trace transactions through the entire chain.
3Ease of manufacture
If multiple services create their own trace IDs at each hop, then local validation is simplified, but correlating activities across services becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the trace ID validation function into the existing API call flow between services. Rather than adding separate validation systems, the clearinghouse incorporates trace ID verification directly into its processing logic, combining multiple functions (trace ID generation, validation, and correlation) into a unified approach that simplifies overall system complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
An example transaction processing system and method are disclosed that employ validating a trace identifier (“trace ID”) of a calling service by a recipient service. In particular, systems and methods are provided such that application programing interface (API) calls to a clearinghouse can be validated and trusted and the trusted trace ID can be used in transactions by the clearinghouse to other entities involving the call to the clearinghouse.