ABSTRACT
Supply Chain Management (SCM) has grown in the last years due to the changing and evolutionary environment. The SCM has become fundamental for gaining financial and social, among others, benefits. Currently, the traditional SCM mechanisms have some areas of improvement, such as the transparency and lack of information, long waiting times for information retrieval and data fidelity. The past months our daily lives have been changing in a drastic way due to COVID-19 and some industries were affected but with this change there has been some opportunities to improve. In this article we describe the main concepts about the blockchain technology, the smart contracts, and their main use. We talk about different areas that these technologies could help to improve in different ways of their internal and external processes. Our main discussion is the description and improvement in the performance inside a supply chain, how it could be possible to speed up the information sharing, how a smart contract could be applied to a consumer-supplier relationship in the healthcare supply chain and the benefits that it would bring to it due to the quick times that this area demands because of the nature of their transactions and operations that are critical to maintain the needs of the industry. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 broke out and spread rapidly, posing a great challenge to the emergency management capacity of various regions in China, especially in rural areas. This paper takes three communities in ShiYang town, Dujiangyan City, Sichuan Province as cases, to analyze the specific practice of rural response to public health emergencies, summarize different stages in epidemic prevention and control, and explore the difficulties and solutions in rural emergency management. Through the case analysis, it is found that the rural epidemic prevention and control in ShiYang Town have experienced four stages including exploration period, development period, improvement period, and maturity period. At the same time, there are some dilemmas in rural emergency management, such as the imperfect emergency management mechanism, insufficient resources guarantee, and villagers’ weak awareness of health and epidemic prevention. Therefore, the paper proposes such countermeasures suggestions as improving the emergency management mechanism of rural public health, optimizing the resources guarantee system for rural emergency management, strengthening the popularization of health education, providing theoretical and practical guidance for improving the level of rural emergency management, and then promoting the modernization of rural emergency management system and capacity. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.