학술논문

Using NFTs for Product Management, Digital Certification, Trading, and Delivery in the Healthcare Supply Chain
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management IEEE Trans. Eng. Manage. Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions on. 71:4480-4501 2024
Subject
Engineering Profession
Medical services
Supply chains
Smart contracts
COVID-19
Systems architecture
Pandemics
Nonfungible tokens
Blockchain
data ownership
digital certification
digital ownership
Ethereum
healthcare
nonfungible tokens (NFTs)
smart contracts
supply chain
Language
ISSN
0018-9391
1558-0040
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic caused disruption in the healthcare market, which resulted in shortages of essential healthcare products. The pandemic exacerbated the problems that already existed in the healthcare supply chain, such as poor data availability, transparency, and accessibility. Such problems necessitate the introduction of a solution that is capable of managing products, maintaining ownership, facilitating trading, and delivering products in a traceable, auditable, and trustworthy manner. In this article, we propose a nonfungible-token-based solution for the management of healthcare products, where the ownership of a product is maintained by using digital certification, the trade and delivery of healthcare products is facilitated by a smart contract, and disputes are settled by an arbitrator while keeping all related information on-chain for auditing purposes. We utilize the Interplanetary File System to store the metadata of healthcare products to avoid storing large-sized data on the blockchain. We present system diagrams and algorithms along with the implementation details. We conduct security testing to demonstrate that our solution is resilient and secure against common vulnerabilities and exploits. We compare our solution with the existing solutions to show its distinctive features and novelty. The smart contracts code is made publicly available on GitHub.