ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted many industries, in particular the healthcare sector exposing systemic vulnerabilities in emergency preparedness, risk mitigation, and supply chain management. A major challenge during the pandemic was related to the increased demand for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), resulting in critical shortages for healthcare and frontline workers. This is due to the lack of information visibility combined with the inability to precisely track product movement within the supply chain, requiring a robust traceability solution. Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger that ensures a transparent, safe, and secure exchange of data among supply chain stakeholders. The advantages of adopting blockchain technology to manage and track PPE products in the supply chain include decentralized control, security, traceability, and auditable time-stamped transactions. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based approach using smart contracts to transform PPE supply chain operations. We propose a generic framework using Ethereum smart contracts and decentralized storage systems to automate the processes and information exchange and present detailed algorithms that capture the interactions among supply chain stakeholders. The smart contract code was developed and tested in Remix environment, and the code is made publicly available on Github. We present detailed cost and security analysis incurred by the stakeholders in the supply chain. Adopting a blockchain-based solution for PPE supply chains is economically viable and provides a streamlined, secure, trusted, and transparent mode of communication among various stakeholders.
ABSTRACT
The sudden development of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations in modern healthcare systems to handle public health emergencies. It is evident that adopting innovative technologies such as blockchain can help in effective planning operations and resource deployments. Blockchain technology can play an important role in the healthcare sector, such as improved clinical trial data management by reducing delays in regulatory approvals, and streamline the communication between diverse stakeholders of the supply chain, etc. Moreover, the spread of misinformation has intensely increased during the outbreak, and existing platforms lack the ability to validate the authenticity of data, leading to public panic and irrational behavior. Thus, developing a blockchain-based tracking system is important to ensure that the information received by the public and government agencies is reliable and trustworthy. In this paper, we review various blockchain applications and opportunities in combating the COVID-19 pandemic and develop a tracking system for the COVID-19 data collected from various external sources. We propose, implement, and evaluate a blockchain-based system using Ethereum smart contracts and oracles to track reported data related to the number of new cases, deaths, and recovered cases obtained from trusted sources. We present detailed algorithms that capture the interactions between stakeholders in the network. We present security analysis and the cost incurred by the stakeholders, and we highlight the challenges and future directions of our work. Our work demonstrates that the proposed solution is economically feasible and ensures data integrity, security, transparency, data traceability among stakeholders.