Making drug supply chain secure traceable and efficient: a Blockchain and smart contract based implementation

The healthcare supply chain involves obtaining resources, managing supplies, and delivering goods and services to patients across multiple teams, stakeholders, and geographical boundaries. With such a complex structure, the healthcare supply chain is vulnerable to fraud, inaccurate data, and lack of transparency. These misdeeds cost businesses money and harm health. To address these issues, the health care supply chain needs an end-to-end decentralized track-and-trace system. Most centralized systems risk drug and data safety. This paper presents an Ethereum blockchain-based solution for a health care supply chain track-and-trace mechanism that uses smart contracts and data immutability. Hash functions store data in a public distributed ledger. This protects and discloses data. Smart contracts automate agreement execution so all parties know the outcome instantly, without an intermediary or time loss. It also outlined decentralized healthcare supply chain application architecture and algorithms. This paper proposes a system to address the lack of transparency and tracking in traditional supply chains. The blockchain-based method proposed in this paper runs on Solidity smart contracts. The system’s algorithms and methods are tested against a variety of inputs, and the results are presented as an average gas cost for specific functionality. The proposed system tracks goods’ histories (medicine). The average gas cost for all accounts is 18,027.2. Overall, log gas costs 48,118.6 to buy medicine, gas costs 229,607.5, and to log out 14,275.The results of the proposed system are compared to state-of-the-art methods. Thus, the presented work allows a seamless flow of medicines via blockchain and smart contracts without intermediaries. Finally, it addresses building a secure pharma supply chain application for blockchain 4.0.