Security and privacy concerns of health records are challenging issues in modern healthcare systems. Typically, in a healthcare system, doctor requires to confirm the legitimacy of patient's health records prescribed by pathological laboratories; insurance company needs to check the validity of medical/diagnosis reports submitted for the insurance claim; and patient requires to ensure his/her health records privacy protection while consulting with different parties (e.g., doctor, nurses, and laboratory staff) involved in healthcare system. Furthermore, health records should not be perceivable to unauthorized parties with malicious intentions on patient's health. Therefore, confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of health records should be preserved while transmitting health records over communication channel and/or while storing data on a third-party server. In recent times, blockchain technology shows potential for publicly verifiable and immutable transactions while managing records in a decentralized system. In this chapter, we discuss about the applicability of blockchain technology for protecting health records with respect to tamperproofing, accountability, ownership, and data privacy. We present a healthcare system powered by protocols using blockchain technology that ensures accountability and transparency of services availed by different entities involved in healthcare system. The proposed protocols address the issue of ill-formed medical report for availing/denial of health insurance, which is a practical problem that needs effective solution from both claimant and service provider. The proposed system addresses this important issue, where the patient can avail deserving service from the insurance company and the insurance company can confirm the legitimacy of the medical report.

Chapter Contents:

• 16.1 Introduction
• 16.2 Preliminaries
• 16.3 The proposed system
• 16.3.1 Description of the protocol
• 16.3.1.1 Policy generation
• 16.3.2 Medical reports uploading
• 16.3.3 Policy claim against treatment
• 16.4 Analysis and discussions
• 16.5 Conclusion
• References

Inspec keywords: patient care; medical information systems; telemedicine; biomedical communication; data privacy; health care

Other keywords: health insurance; patient; insurance company; blockchain-powered healthcare insurance system; health records privacy protection; blockchain technology; healthcare system; modern healthcare systems

Subjects: Medical administration; Biology and medical computing; Data security; Biomedical communication