Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted many industries, in
particular the healthcare sector exposing systemic vulnerabilities in
emergency preparedness, risk mitigation, and supply chain management. A
major challenge during the pandemic was related to the increased demand
of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) resulting in critical shortages
for healthcare and frontline workers. The lack of information visibility
combined with the inability to precisely track product movement within
the supply chain requires an robust traceability solution. Blockchain
technology is a distributed ledger that ensures a transparent,
safe, and secure exchange of data among supply chain stakeholders. The
advantages of adopting blockchain technology to manage and track PPE
products in the supply chain include decentralized control, security,
traceability,
and auditable time-stamped transactions. In this paper, we present a
blockchain-based approach using smart contracts to transform PPE supply
chain operations. We propose a generic framework using Ethereum smart
contracts and
decentralized storage systems to automate the processes and information
exchange and present detailed algorithms that capture the interactions
among supply chain stakeholders. The smart contract code was developed
and tested in Remix environment, and the code is made publicly available
on Github. We present detailed cost and security analysis incurred by
the stakeholders in the supply chain. Adopting a blockchain-based
solution for PPE supply chains is economically viable and provides a
streamlined, secure, trusted, and transparent mode of communication
among various stakeholders.