Blockchain and Health Insurance: What are the Advantages?

The active dissemination of blockchain in the health sector will result in truly revolutionary changes to health insurance. The potential for blockchain’s contribution to this sphere is huge. First of all, access to a single medical insurance policy, which would operate on a trans-national scale through blockchain will become a reality.

Currently, unified medical insurance is hampered by bureaucracy throughout the intermediary chain, as well as difficulties related to checking out insurance companies. Counterfeit cases and other errors in health insurance lead to in excess of 40 billion US dollars in annual losses. These instances of huge losses can be avoided by using blockchain to organize the exchange of information between health insurers, patients and hospitals.

Blockchain also reduces the need for intermediaries between the patient and medical institution. Furthermore, the opportunity to quickly exchange information is transparent for all participants, and excludes the risk of abuse as the entire process of information exchange between the clinics, patient and insurance companies is simplified. The speed of transactions, in turn, directly affects the speed of the provision of medical services, which in itself saves lives and limits the amount of risk to a patient’s health.

This technology is extremely beneficial in the sense that the transparency of transactions protects insurance companies themselves from out-payments against falsified insurance cases. Rapid exchange of information between the medical institution and the representatives of an insurance company can help resolve cases if there is in fact an insurance event with a specific patient. Thus, blockchain not only substantially modernizes the scope of medical insurance, but it also protects the rights and interests of all key participants in the process - patients, doctors, and insurers.