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 distributed environments where different stakeholders, who do not have any trust between them, interact with each other through a secured and transparent platform. 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) processing system. First, we design an Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram identifying all actors with their respective data and relations between them. We also develop the business model and algorithms for all necessary steps. We implement the system in Hyperledger Fabric and deploy a smart contract to implement these algorithms. We introduce CouchDB to store the OffChain data where we store World-State Database. B-SAHIC provides a web-based portal for all actors who interact with the blockchain. Privacy of clients’ claim-related data is ensured by encrypting treatment-related data with a new key that is derived uniquely for each new submission done of clients’ personal documents. We have also deployed Hyperledger Explorer, a user-friendly web application tool for monitoring the health state of each node participating on the blockchain network. We have studied the performance of B-SAHIC for two to six peer nodes. Moreover, our performance study shows that B-SAHIC is fast and scalable. In our study, the average query latency is decreased from 0.07 second (for two peer nodes) to 0.02 second (for six peer nodes) in case of 1300 queries per second while the average transaction latency remains unchanged (around 3.5 seconds) for 300 transactions per second. Moreover, B-SAHIC consumes minimum resources, around 350MB only for two peer nodes. We believe that the development process of this blockchain based platform can be applicable for the automation of other insurance industry too.