Smart Contracts and Healthcare Transactions

Abstract

This chapter delves into the transformative role of smart contracts within healthcare transactions, emphasizing their potential to streamline processes, enhance data security, and optimize patient engagement. Built on blockchain technology, smart contracts automate agreements with embedded terms in code, offering a more secure, efficient, and transparent alternative to traditional methods. This study highlights the benefits of smart contracts in patient record management, insurance claim processing, and supply chain logistics, addressing critical challenges like high implementation costs, technical integration, and regulatory compliance. By exploring both opportunities and hurdles, this chapter provides insights into the future of smart contracts in the healthcare sector. This chapter is aimed at bringing a comprehensive view of smart contracts and their potential to transform healthcare transactions. The objectives of this chapter include exploring business opportunities of smart contracts and enhancing health products and services in the areas of electronic health records and processing of insurance claims. Further, the deployment of smart contracts will be evaluated with respect to risks, challenges, and ethical considerations for data privacy and regulatory compliance. It also evaluates the cost-benefit analysis that deals with financial implications and return on investment. Examples from the real world, along with future trends of applicability, practice, and novelty in this area, are addressed at the end of the chapter on the use of smart contracts in healthcare.