A Blockchain-Based Approach for Drug Traceability in Healthcare Supply Chain

EasyChair Preprint 9807

Abstract

Healthcare supply chains are intricate networks that go across several organizational and geographic borders and serve as the structural backbone for many services that are essential to daily living. Such systems' intrinsic complexity makes it possible to add impurities like erroneous data, a lack of transparency, and a weak data provenance. One result of these restrictions within the current supply chains is the production of counterfeit medications, which not only has a substantial negative impact on people's health but also costs the healthcare sector a great deal of money. The necessity for a reliable, end-to-end track and trace system for pharmaceutical supply chains has therefore been highlighted by current research. To ensure product safety and get rid of fakes, the pharmaceutical supply chain needs a comprehensive product tracking system. The majority of current track and trace systems are centralized, which results in data Issues with authenticity, openness, and privacy in healthcare supply networks. In this work, we describe an Ethereum Blockchainbased strategy for effective product traceability in the healthcare supply chain, utilizing smart contracts and decentralized off-chain storage. The smart contract gives a secure, immutable history of transactions to all parties and ensures data provenance. It also does away with the need for middlemen. We outline the system architecture and comprehensive algorithms that underpin the fundamental operations of our suggested solution. We test and validate the system, and then offer a cost and security analysis to determine how well it can improve traceability inside pharmaceutical supply chains.

Keyphrases: Blockchain, Drug Counterfeiting, Healthcare, Security, Traceability, Trust, supply chain

@booklet{EasyChair:9807,
  author    = {Anusha Ampavathi and Shashidhar Thallapally and Srivani Maroju and Srikanth Masigalla and Ramesh Annamalla},
  title     = {A Blockchain-Based Approach for Drug  Traceability in Healthcare Supply Chain},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9807},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2023}}