Blockchain-based Solutions for Contemporary Healthcare Supply Chain Management Problems

Abstract

Healthcare is a complex system spanning across multiple organizational and geographical boundaries, providing a critical backbone to services vital for everyday life. The inherent complexity of such a system can introduce impurities such as lack of transparency and accountability, inaccurate information, and limited data access and provenance. The existing healthcare system falls short of having a transparent, secure, and trustworthy scheme that addresses the existing problems and impurities, which jeopardizes patients’ safety. In this thesis, we propose blockchain-based solutions for some of the most common contemporary healthcare supply chain management problems. These problems include drug traceability, distribution and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines, administration of controlled medication, covid-19 vaccine waste, and product management. First, we address the drug traceability problem in healthcare supply chain by implementing a solution with full decentralization, transparency, and traceability, using smart contracts and decentralized storage. Second, we ensure that the distribution and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines is fully trackable, traceable, and transparent, using smart contracts, decentralized storage, and IoT-Enabled smart container. Third, we establish traceability for the administration of controlled medication in a transparent, auditable, reliable, and secure environment, using smart contracts, decentralized storage, and private blockchain configuration. Fourth, we enable the reduction of the waste generated from the overproduction and underutilization of COVID-19 vaccines in a decentralized, transparent, and traceable manner. Finally, we integrate Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to manage ownership, trading, delivery, and dispute settlement for products within the healthcare supply chain, using smart contracts, decentralized storage, and NFTs standards. For all the proposed solutions, we design a system architecture, develop algorithms that describe the smart contracts, deploy our smart contracts for testing and validation, and discuss our solutions in terms of security, performance, and generalization.

Date of Award	Dec 2022
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Raja Jayaraman (Supervisor)