A Blockchain-centric Data Sharing Framework for Building Trust in Healthcare Insurance

Data sharing is very important in the healthcare insurance industry, given that a premium claim often needs data from multi-parties, such as patients, hospitals, banks, and insurance companies. Generally, data sharing only occurs when sufficient trust exists among the multiple parties involved with the claim. However, since fierce competition and lack of trust may exist among some of these parties, willingness of data sharing may be severely restricted in healthcare insurance. Furthermore, healthcare data are private and sensitive. Risk of privacy disclosure is also a major problem we must consider for managing shared data in healthcare insurance. As blockchain has been proposed in recent years as a potential solution to enable multi-party trust, we develop in this article a blockchain-centric data sharing framework to resolve the trust problem in the context of healthcare insurance. Specifically, we construct a trusted data sharing platform built on blockchain where each party uploads their encrypted data to the blockchain while the immutability of blockchain prevents any data tampering and the traceability of blockchain helps identify attacks to the data immediately after they happen. Moreover, we also develop zero-knowledge-proof mechanisms to ensure that data verification can be made without any disclosure of data specifics.