3 Things to Know About Blockchain Insurtech, in Actual English

B3i has focused on blockchain efforts for property & casualty insurance, but RiskBlock recently teamed up with LIMRA to introduce an app that life insurers can use to monitor the Social Security Administration's Death Master File.

3. Blockchain could help life and health insurers with activities that already involve use of old-fashioned paper or digital ledgers.

The VUE report authors note that health insurers, health care providers and patients often have to collect and share medical records, and that life and annuity issuers need to track information about whether people are alive or dead.

Blockchain technology could create good, useful systems that people can use to share health and mortality records, the report authors write.

Because blockchain ledgers are encrypted, the ledgers already meet federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) health information data security requirements, the authors write.

The parties involved in using blockchain systems can have different levels of approvals, or "permissions," for reading and adding to the data.

A blockchain-based death reporting system, for example, could give hospitals and hospice services permission to enter information about deaths. Life insurers could get the names of life insurance policyholders and annuity contract holders who have died.

A life insurer that wanted to pay death benefits for funeral services promptly could use blockchain technology to offer a beneficiary a list of nearby funeral homes, and to arrange to send benefits to the funeral home, according to the VUE report authors.

Similarly, for parties who create and use medical records, having varying levels of access to an encrypted, distributed medical record database could make sharing records quicker and easier, the report authors write.

"Countless parties require access to medical records, while still others are required to add to the records themselves — primary care doctors, specialists, insurance companies, pharmacists, surgeons — dozens of professionals over the course of a lifetime," the report authors write. "With a distributed ledger, an individual could very easily grant and revoke both read and write access to their medical records."

Resources

A copy of the VUE Software blockchain tech report is available here.

— Read Cognizant to Use Blockchain Tech to Rewire Life Industry in India, on ThinkAdvisor.

— Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on LinkedIn and Twitter.