B-SAHIC: A Blockchain based Secured and Automated Health Insurance Claim processing system

Abstract

In recent years, Blockchain technology has been successfully used in many dis- tributed environments where different stakeholders, who do not have any trust relationship among them, interact each other in a secured and transparent way. An insurance industry might be benefited through the use of an automated, transpar- ent claim submission and processing system. The use of Blockchain in healthcare insurance industry has not been studied methodically. In this study, we develop a Blockchain based Secured and Automated Health Insurance Claim (B-SAHIC) pro- cessing system. First, we design the Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram by identifying all the actors, their related data and the relationship among them. We also develop the business model and algorithms for all necessary steps. We implement the sys- tem in Hyperledger Fabric and deploy chaincode and smart contract to implement these algorithms. We introduce CouchDB to store the OffChain data where we store the up-to-date information. B-SAHIC provides a web-based portal for all the actors to interact with the Blockchain. Privacy of clients’ claim related data is ensured by encrypting treatment related data with a key that is derived uniquely for each data. We have deployed Hyperledger Explorer, a user-friendly web application tool that facilitates us to explore, invoke, deploy or query the exiting blocks, transactions and associated data. Moreover, our performance study shows that B-SAHIC is scalable and fast, and consumes minimum resources. We believe that the scope of B-SAHIC will not only be limited to health insurance industry. The development process of this Blockchain based platform can be applicable for the automation of any insurance industry.