Blood and Product-Chain: Blood and its Products Supply Chain Management based on Blockchain Approach

Abstract

This paper provides a novel implementation of blockchain technology, and data is stored in a decentralized distributed ledger to assist information protection in blood supply chain management and prevent data loss or identity theft. The present blood supply is used exclusively from the blood of volunteers (known as donors), making blood and its derivatives one of the significant roles in treating diseases today. In particular, depending on the type of product extracted from the blood (e.g., red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, plasma). They require different procedures and storage environments (e.g., time, temperature, humidity). However, the current blood management processes are done manually - where all medical staff does all data entry. Additionally, data about the complete blood donation process (e.g., blood donors, blood recipients, blood inventories) is held centrally and is challenging to examine accurately. Therefore, ensuring centralized data security is extremely difficult because of stealing personal information or losing data. In this study, we present the blockchain technology-based blood management process and offer Blood and Product-Chain, a decentralized distributed ledger that stores data to address these restrictions. Specifically, we target two main contributions: i) we design the Blood and Product-Chain model to manage all relevant information about blood and its products based on blockchain technology, and ii) we implement the proof-of-concept of Blood and Product-Chain by Hyperledger Fabric and evaluate this in the two scenarios (i.e., data creation and data access).