DHIP

Decentralized community insurance pool between patients and healthcare system. New model for healthcare insurance deactivates purposeful inefficiencies propagated by the medical industrial complex.

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Decentralized Healthcare Insurance Protocol (DHIP)

The concept of the smart contract inherently enables a trustless interaction between the insured and healthcare provider. The authors’ purpose is the elimination of the healthcare insurance paper product, which underwrites “purposeful inefficiencies” as a business model: such tactics include willful lack of price and supply chain transparency, denial-of-care tactics, copyrighted medical code--all of which supplants medical practice for profiteering motives. Using Ethereum, a model is installed wherein patient readily stakes a certain amount into a community pool through an annual tokenized subscription model which provides proof of ownership enabling unfettered access into the corridors of medicine. The smart contract owner provides credentialing measures and wallet authorization for healthcare provider—tantamount to KYC. Healthcare provider inputs billing cost, procedure code, pharmaceutical supply code, disease process code into blockchain, in return for payment. This enables supply chain information to feed the data economy of the medical industrial complex (MIC) in a transparent manner; and further augments supply chain economics by way of node installations which have the potential to carry oracle constructs into MIC smart contract processes. The resultant effect of such a model is the authentic cost of medical care in a given community, resulting in the expiration of unfair, inefficient practices executed by the healthcare industry.

How we built it

Django, Chainlink, OpenZeppelin, Brownie, and Truffle. The smart contract is written with Solidity for the ethereum blockchain. Chainlink alarm clock was implemented to schedule a delayed job to handle the membership expiration/renewal automatically.

Challenges we ran into

Multifaceted cross-collaboration was inherently limiting, as parties had to teach each other aspects of the Medical Industrial Complex and learn/discuss the nuances of smartcontract programming and development; which successfully led to a cross pollination of ideas, enhancing project dynamics. On a large scale, such a project will require input from a greater number of medical doctors, scientific experts, and developers; all operating in a democratic seamless manner with progressive leadership.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making a product that enhances the social good. The smart contract provides a solid foundation for anyone to create a version of this protocol with novel use cases. We are also proud of learning how to build upon Chainlink together as few of us had prior blockchain development experience.

What we learned

The team learned about the concept of Blockchain along with Chainlink, OpenZeppelin, Brownie, and Truffle.

What's next for some project

Future developments would include creating new pages for the patient and hospital to interact with the smart contract. We would also explore the design for an off-chain verification server or private blockchain to handle hospital and patient verification--to enhance patient anonymity and privacy. This could reduce gas costs by combining transactions and limiting on-chain computation.

Furthermore, by integrating into the data economy, the patient cost-sharing insurance pool could also benefit from and increase its longevity by running an oracle to provide anonymized medical pricing/billing/procedure/treatment data; in effect, the cost-sharing pool would self-monetize from rendering transparent supply chain information.

Icons from the website are from the Noun Project

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