NFT-Based Traceability and Ownership Management of Medical Devices

Abstract

Healthcare supply chains have evolved drastically over time, with complex domestic and global networks and interactions spanning across various organizations and entities. This gives rise to numerous challenges related to information and data pertaining to medical devices used within healthcare supply chain, including data integrity, provenance, traceability, and transparency. Counterfeit medical devices are a major obstacle that the healthcare industry is trying to resolve as it poses a huge risk to the safety of its users. Therefore, it is paramount to have an end-to-end system in place that tracks medical devices not only as they move across the supply chain but also as they are purchased and sold online in digital marketplaces. Unfortunately, existing systems follow a centralized architecture, which leads to being a single point of failure and eradicating transparency and authentication. In this paper, we propose a non-fungible token (NFT) based solution that exploits blockchain smart contracts, integrates tokenization protocols, and utilizes a decentralized storage system for a reliable and efficient medical devices traceability system and ownership management solution. In our proposed system, NFTs are used to represent the digital twin of the medical device. This digital twin captures the medical device attributes and its relevant metadata during its life cycle from production, manufacturing, distribution and movement, to current use and ownership. We present the system architecture and implementation details, along with tested algorithms that define the various functions of our smart contracts. The paper also presents testing details and analyses the solution’s feasibility through a cost and security analysis.

Keywords

• NFTs
• blockchain
• ethereum
• smart contracts
• medical device counterfeiting
• healthcare