Using Large Language Models for Generating Smart Contracts for Health Insurance from Textual Policies

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of Large Language Models to automatically generate blockchain smart contracts for health insurance policies from textual descriptions, demonstrating promising results with some limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-stage methodology for translating health insurance policies into smart contracts using LLMs, including summaries, decision logic, and code generation.

Findings

LLMs excel at generating textual summaries of policies

Generated smart contract code often requires human review for correctness

Performance varies with the complexity of scenarios and language popularity

Abstract

We explore using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate application code that automates health insurance processes from text-based policies. We target blockchain-based smart contracts as they offer immutability, verifiability, scalability, and a trustless setting: any number of parties can use the smart contracts, and they need not have previously established trust relationships with each other. Our methodology generates outputs at increasing levels of technical detail: (1) textual summaries, (2) declarative decision logic, and (3) smart contract code with unit tests. We ascertain LLMs are good at the task (1), and the structured output is useful to validate tasks (2) and (3). Declarative languages (task 2) are often used to formalize healthcare policies, but their execution on blockchain is non-trivial. Hence, task (3) attempts to directly automate the process using smart contracts. To assess the LLM output, we propose completeness, soundness, clarity, syntax, and functioning code as metrics. Our evaluation employs three health insurance policies (scenarios) with increasing difficulty from Medicare's official booklet. Our evaluation uses GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-3.5 Turbo 16K, GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo and CodeLLaMA. Our findings confirm that LLMs perform quite well in generating textual summaries. Although outputs from tasks (2)-(3) are useful starting points, they require human oversight: in multiple cases, even "runnable" code will not yield sound results; the popularity of the target language affects the output quality; and more complex scenarios still seem a bridge too far. Nevertheless, our experiments demonstrate the promise of LLMs for translating textual process descriptions into smart contracts.