Blockchain payments can make ‘medical tourism’ more efficient

In the wake of rising blockchain popularity, the medical tourism industry is bound to be among the top beneficiaries.

Dr. Prem Jagyasi, an MD and a world-leading medical tourism industry expert, believes that the distributed ledger technology is the answer to the key challenges facing the industry.

Payments technology will play a major role, as will blockchain. Regarding health care transactions, some blockchain solutions have introduced universal industry-specific tokens that can be used to pay for treatment across borders.

Patients can use blockchain pay for services within the whole global network of an organization. This ensures faster, cheaper and much more secure transactions, independent from governments, banks and national borders. Even better, the holders of these tokens get rewarded for healthy habits, health surveys and feedback.

Usually, people rely on insurance providers to cater for their health care needs abroad. These insurance companies are plagued by fraud and scams, which translate to 5-10% of annual health care costs.

According to Medical Tourism magazine, popular insurance scams include phantom billing scams, patient billing scams and upcoding schemes. Blockchain can help end these by eliminating intermediaries through automation of claim payments and settling of disputes through smart contracts.

As medical tourism continues to grow, there is no doubt that more and better blockchain use cases will come up. With blockchain-powered medical tourism industry solutions coming up by day, there is no doubt that the future of health care will be beyond borders.