A Blockchain-Based Solution for Mitigating Overproduction and Underconsumption of Medical Supplies

Abstract

Billions of dollars lost has been recorded over the past decade due to the overproduction and underconsumption of medical supplies. The overproducation and underconsumption are usually due to the lack of accountability, transparency, traceability, audit, assessment, security, and trust features in the current healthcare supply chain systems. It is required to ensure that everyone is getting a fair share of medical supplies without unnecessary waste. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution that ensures the commitment and accountability of all participants to prevent them from producing any unnecessary waste. We introduce five phases, such as registration, commitment, production, delivery, and consumption, to perform the waste assessment accurately and fairly. We develop four smart contracts that ensure data provenance, transparency, security, and accountability while recording all actions on an immutable ledger automatically. We utilize offchain decentralized storage to deal with the large data problem. We present five algorithms and discuss each phase of the proposed solution, along with their full implementation, testing, and validation details. We conduct the security analysis to ensure that our smart contracts are secure enough and they do not have vulnerabilities and flaws. The smart contracts code is made publicly available on GitHub.

Keywords

• Medical supply
• medical waste
• commitment
• waste accountability
• traceability
• blockchain