TY - JOUR
T1 - A novel medical blockchain model for drug supply chain integrity management in a smart hospital
AU - Jamil, Faisal
AU - Hang, Lei
AU - Kim, Kyu Hyung
AU - Kim, Do Hyeun
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding: This work was supported by Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) grant funded by the Korean government. [19ZD1100, Development of ICT Convergence Technology for Daegu-GyeongBuk Regional Industry], and this research was supported by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2017-2016-0-00313) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2019/5/7
Y1 - 2019/5/7
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Blockchain
KW - Distributed ledger
KW - Drug supply chain
KW - Healthcare
KW - Hyperledger fabric
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85066980008&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/electronics8050505
DO - 10.3390/electronics8050505
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85066980008
VL - 8
JO - Electronics (Switzerland)
JF - Electronics (Switzerland)
SN - 2079-9292
IS - 5
M1 - 505
ER -