2023

Haque A.K.M. Bahalul; Bhushan Bharat

Blockchain-based applications are now becoming prevalent in every aspect of human life for promoting security, trust, and reliability. Healthcare is one of the most important basic human needs, where trust, security, and privacy are crucial. Healthcare services involve medical insurance, which is beneficial for emergencies and general medical services. People avail themselves of various healthcare facilities using medical insurance by placing legitimate claims. Similarly, the service must provide the necessary facilities upon that claim. However, similar to other multiparty trading problems, medical insurance also suffers from fraudulent claims from customers. Customers can also face untoward delays and administrative complexity regarding insurance claims. Motivated by these trust and reliability problems, this chapter leverages blockchain technology as a service enabler, and will comprehensively outline the current situation of blockchain usage in medical insurance. Firstly, this chapter presents blockchain fundamentals to provide the reader with a sound background on blockchain. Later, this chapter briefly describes the outline of blockchain usage in healthcare and various features of blockchain. Furthermore, this work comprehensively describes the benefits of using blockchain in medical insurance with the help of a recent literature synthesis. Finally, future research avenues are presented in a tabular format along with research gaps.