IoT-driven blockchain to manage the healthcare supply chain and protect medical records

Abstract

Healthcare supply chain domain and medical records’ management face numerous challenges that come with new demands, such as customer dissatisfaction, rising healthcare costs, tracking and traceability of drugs, and security and privacy related to the sensitive information managed in such a domain. Executing processes related to healthcare domain in a trusted, secure, efficient, accessible and traceable manner is challenging due to the fragmented nature of the healthcare supply chain, which is prone to systemic errors and redundant efforts that may compromise patient safety and negatively impact health outcomes. To cope with such issues, blockchain technology, combined with the Internet of Things (IoT), can offers a reliable way to track and trace products and protect medical data though a peer-to-peer distributed, secure, and shared ledger. Hence, this paper proposes an IoT-driven blockchain-based architecture to manage the healthcare supply chain and protect medical records from tampering and access violation. Hyperledger Fabric, which is a permissioned blockchain, has been adopted due to the sensitive and private nature of the collected data. The envisioned network has been implemented and performance has been evaluated in terms of execution time, resources consumption and throughput.