Blockchain-based resale and leasing of pre-owned medical equipment

Abstract

Medical equipment plays a crucial role in the global healthcare industry, towards the delivery of high-quality medical care and contributing to positive patient outcomes. The traditional method of handling pre-owned medical equipment often leads to improper disposal of functional devices in landfills, compelling healthcare providers to invest in costly brand-new equipment. Several proposals have been put forth to establish trading platforms that facilitate the resale of pre-owned medical equipment. However, existing solutions are characterized by a centralized approach, and face challenges related to traceability, certification, system se-curity, and equipment reliability. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution that is capable of orchestrating the resale, leasing, and auctioning of pre-owned medical equipment. Blockchain smart contracts are utilized to automate the resale and leasing process, register stakeholders with authenticity, transfer and verify ownership, and maintain public reputation scores of entities. A comprehensive overview of the architectural components, sequence diagrams, and algorithms that define the operations of our solution is provided. In addition, we develop and test a working implementation of the smart contracts to verify the feasibility of our proposed solution in terms of execution cost and code security. Through a discussion of the proposed solution's key components and concepts, we showcase our solution's ability to fulfill the specified requirements and attain the main objectives. Moreover, we evaluate and compare our solution with existing works in terms of capabilities and robustness, and explore potential adaptations and extensions of our architecture to allow for a wide range of additional use cases. Our smart contract code has been made publicly available on GitHub.