A Novel Medical Blockchain Model for Drug Supply Chain Integrity Management in a Smart Hospital

Abstract

At present, in pharmacology one of the most serious problems is counterfeit drugs. The Health Research Funding organization reported that in developing countries, nearly 10–30% of the drugs are fake. Counterfeiting is not the main issue itself, but, rather, the fact that, as compared to traditional drugs, these counterfeit drugs produce different side effects to human health. According to WHO, around 30% of the total medicine sold in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is counterfeit. This is the major worldwide problem, and the situation is worse in developing countries, where one out of every 10 medicines are either fake or do not follow drug regulations. The rise of Internet pharmacies has made it more difficult to standardize drug safety. It is difficult to detect counterfeits because these drugs pass through different complex distributed networks, thus forming opportunities for counterfeits to enter the authentic supply chain. The safety of the pharmaceutical supply chain has become a major concern for public health, which is a collective process. In this paper, we propose a novel drug supply chain management using Hyperledger Fabric based on blockchain technology to handle secure drug supply chain records. The proposed system solves this problem by conducting drug record transactions on a blockchain to create a smart healthcare ecosystem with a drug supply chain. A smart contract is launched to give time-limited access to electronic drug records and also patient electronic health records. We also carried out a number of experiments in order to demonstrate the usability and efficiency of the designed platform. Finally, we used Hyperledger Caliper as a benchmarking tool to conduct the performance of the designed system in terms of transactions per second, transaction latency, and resource utilization.