Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) has brought unprecedented changes to the society and permeated our daily life. However, it has not been successfully applied in the area of medical waste regulation, where the recycling and disposal of medical waste have significant loopholes in the management of classification, transportation, disposal, supervision, and other links. The source, authenticity, and integrity of medical waste data lack guarantees, and there is a risk of data tampering and forgery. Although there are currently some medical waste supervision applications combined with IoT-based blockchain domestically and internationally to facilitate information sharing and transfer, no verifiable method is provided for the information privacy leakage of medical waste operators. To address this problem, we propose a blockchain-based medical waste supervision model, which connects participants involved in the process, introduces digital credentials to achieve the protection of operator information privacy, and ensures that the entire data process is authentic and credible. By building a decentralized system architecture and setting intelligent contracts, we integrate and record the medical waste disposal regulatory information in different phases on the blockchain to form the supervision of medical waste chain. In addition, we digitize the physical credentials and certificates using digital credentials to achieve cryptography security and privacy protection. The regulatory model designed in this paper can provide digital certificates of disposal tracking information to the health, environmental protection, and other administrative departments in China. It can provide authoritative evidence for the supervision and accountability of medical waste disposal and support the construction of a new generation of medical waste regulatory information systems in China.
Highlights
Medical waste, known as “No 1 hazardous waste,” refers to the waste containing directly or indirectly infectious, viral, and other hazards produced by medical and health institutions in medical treatment, prevention, healthcare, and other related activities [1]
To manage medical waste more safely, in July 2018, the National Health Commission launched the pilot application construction project of the provincial credit information management platform and selected Fujian Province and other pilot provinces to build a medical waste supervision system based on IoT-enabled blockchain technology
With the outbreak of COVID-19, the National Health Commission has increasingly stringent regulatory requirements for medical waste, and new solutions are urgently needed to improve the efficiency of supervision
Summary
Known as “No 1 hazardous waste,” refers to the waste containing directly or indirectly infectious, viral, and other hazards produced by medical and health institutions in medical treatment, prevention, healthcare, and other related activities [1]. In terms of the application and practical value of this model, we developed a medical waste supervision system based on the regulatory model proposed in this paper, the RepChain blockchain essential components [18, 19] independently developed by the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and related technologies of the IoT [20].
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