Blockchain for Community Health Insurance in Smart Villages: A Decentralized Approach to Transparency, Trust, and Efficiency

Abstract

Rural and underprivileged areas continue to grapple with the availability of affordable and dependable healthcare funding.Community based health insurance mechanisms are rife with inefficiencies including long delays in claim processing, fraudulent reporting, lack of transparency, and weak guardrails.This paper suggests a smart village-focused blockchain-based system on community health insurance.The platform is built on top of permissioned blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized identity management to secure policy issuance, transparent premium collection, automated claims settlement, and community-based network governance.A prototype was implemented based on Hyperledger Fabric with off-chain storage of medical data and a mobile app for rural access.A simulation study was implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework on a synthetic claim data, which have shown to significantly decrease the claim processing time, increase the rate of fraud detection, and raise the trust perception by all the involved users.Contribution -The proposed study aims to contribute towards designing and implementing (blockchain-enabled) healthcare financing models to pave the way for the promotion of sustainable healthcare for equitable benefits in rural smart village ecosystems.