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Drug traceability and transparency in medical supply chain using blockchain for easing the process and creating trust between stakeholders and consumers

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Abstract

Without a proper mechanism to track and authenticate drugs, both stakeholder and consumer experience dilemmas. The dilemmas arise between stakeholders and consumers are related to of coordination, inventory management, human resource dependency, order management, stock management, expiry of medicines data etc. Stakeholders are unable to analyse the demands, hence becoming incapable of optimizing their production and storage. Likewise, a consumer remains suspicious about the authenticity of the drug. A medical supply chain promotes updating medicine status at each checkpoint, reducing the disputes caused by medicine ' s unseen journey. In the current market, medical supply chains are present, but they are centralized. A centralized medical supply chain is typically tedious and expensive to maintain and does not provide adequate features to analyse markets. Above all, it brands merely a certificate to prove the authenticity of a drug. However, by using a blockchain platform, the medical supply chain problems can be solved efficiently. This blockchain-based medical supply chain’s key feature is to system stores all the medicine batch ' s transfer history. First, a pharmaceutical company is permitted to register a medicine. After the manufacturing of a registered medicine, a batch-manager uploads its details on the platform ' s network. Hereafter, any further exchange of this batch needs both sender and receiver ' s approval. Only after the successful completion of this procedure, an exchange occurs. A corresponding exchange transaction is permanently stored on the network. This sequence shapes the system to follow a systematic order and eliminates the possibility of a third-person fraud. Lastly, we made a DApp (Decentralized Application) for the tracking of the medical supply chain. A medical supply chain built on the blockchain provides immutability, transparency, automation, and integrity. This paper aims to introduce a model to maintain medical supply chain records on the blockchain while explaining blockchain technology. Moreover, the blockchain platforms and their dependencies are explained lucidly. The medical supply chain’s implementation and design are performed using smart contracts, Web3.js library, and JavaScript. Furthermore, the system is tested on both a local network, the Truffle suite, and the Kovan test network. In the future, the use of IoT inculcating integrated chip that can automatically update a batch’s location, temperature, and other physical conditions periodically can be developed.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education of INDIA under Grant IFHE/RC/Sep2020/68, in part by the seed money, Case Research Center, ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education, Hyderabad, INDIA.

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  1. Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, IcfaiTech (Faculty of Science and Technology), ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education (Deemed to be University), Hyderabad, India

    Sandeep Kumar Panda

  2. School of Computer Engineering, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India

    Suresh Chandra Satapathy

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  1. Sandeep Kumar Panda
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Correspondence to Suresh Chandra Satapathy.

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Panda, S.K., Satapathy, S.C. Drug traceability and transparency in medical supply chain using blockchain for easing the process and creating trust between stakeholders and consumers. Pers Ubiquit Comput 28, 75–91 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-021-01588-3

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