Plans by a group of leading healthcare industry firms to create a joint database of doctors and other healthcare providers using Quorum’s Ethereum-based enterprise blockchain technology got a boost this past week when two industry giants—insurer Aetna, which was just purchased by CVS Health, and Ascension, the largest non-profit health system in the country with more than 150 hospitals—joined the project. The Synaptic Health Alliance’s overarching goal is see if blockchain’s distributed ledger technology can be used to share the burden of managing healthcare provider data while improving its accuracy, without adding another intermediary to the process. The other members are health insurers Humana and UnitedHealthcare, healthcare cost management provider…