Blockchain Based RFID Prototype For Medicine Traceability along the Healthcare Supply Chain

Abstract

Healthcare supply chain refers to the process of procurement and distribution of medicines and other healthcare products as they move from the manufacturing plant to the patient. This is a very complex and distributed process that comes with a set of challenges like scalability, synchronization and trust between the involved parties. The increase in adoption of Radio-frequency Identification (RFID) based systems in the healthcare supply chain shows that RFID technology is a very promising technique for traceability, identification and communication. However, these RFID systems still face issues of privacy and security which need to be addressed to get their full benefit. In this research work, we have integrated RFID systems belonging to the Healthcare supply chain with secure decentralized storage such as Blockchain. Blockchains provides a secure and transparent decentralized mechanism that is used to keep track of all transactions. It offers a new kind of implementation focused on trust, transparency, and accountability. Information about the RFID enabled medicines and other Healthcare products can be added to our proposed framework via a blockchain-based decentralized application (Dapp). The proposed system is based on an Ethereum node, and this information can be stored in a Blockchain using multi-stage interfaces provided by the Smart Contract. Our proposed system has been deployed both on an offline and online environment, and it offers many advantages like monitoring and tracing of medicine through the Blockchain network, determining if the medicine is genuine or counterfeit, and reducing the number of counterfeit and unapproved medicine entering the Healthcare system. Based on simulation results, the proposed framework successfully provides the needed security and privacy required for the healthcare supply chain.