SSI-MedRx: A fraud-resilient healthcare system based on blockchain and SSI

Abstract

Today, healthcare fraud poses a significant issue, encompassing everything from falsified billing claims and phantom services to the excessive prescription of opioid medications and medical identity theft. These deceptive activities cause substantial financial losses, erode patient trust, compromise healthcare quality, and threaten patient safety. In this paper, we introduce SSI-MedRx, a healthcare system based on blockchain technology and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), designed to ensure cross-border interoperability, preserve patient privacy, and prevent challenging healthcare frauds, including medical identity theft, phantom billing, kickbacks, and opioid overprescribing. By design, our system empowers patients by granting them complete control over their personal and health data. This shift toward patient-centric data management can potentially reduce the risk of data breaches, improve care coordination, and improve overall healthcare outcomes. • We provide an overview of current healthcare systems and their threat models. • We offer guidelines and requirements for designing a borderless, fraud-resilient, and privacy-preserving healthcare system. • We propose a novel healthcare system based on blockchain and self-sovereign identity resilient to healthcare fraud. • We implement a Proof of Concept (PoC) to highlight the advantages of the proposed system compared to existing healthcare systems in the literature and suggest a few future directions.