Blockchain-Based Solution for the Administration of Controlled Medication

Controlled drugs are open to abuse, misuse, and diversion. Therefore, they are regulated and tracked across the healthcare sector to protect the health of the general public which is a highly prioritized rule in the health professional's code of ethics. Healthcare centers that provide controlled medication to patients are still using manual papers to record controlled drugs production, delivery, prescription, administration, and disposal which causes delays in the system. Moreover, instances of controlled drugs misuse, abuse, and diversion still exist, which shows how the currently used system is inefficient in detecting such activities. Therefore, to ensure that the public health is safe and secure, an end-to-end system that tracks the whole healthcare supply chain is necessary. In this paper, we introduce a private Ethereum blockchain-based solution for the management of controlled medication. We ensure transparency, accountability, security, and data provenance by developing smart contracts that record all actions on an immutable ledger. We utilize off-chain storage, which is represented in the IPFS to store content that is large in size such as images. We present algorithms of the different phases in the proposed solution to illustrate how each phase will be carried out. We showcase the functionality of the proposed solution by performing tests and validating the smart contracts. We assess the performance of the proposed solution by conducting privacy, security, and confidentiality analysis. Performance evaluation shows that our solution is secure against common attacks and vulnerabilities and preserves the privacy and confidentiality of the patients. The smart contracts code is made publicly available along with the testing scripts.

Automated summary

Controlled drugs are prone to abuse, misuse, and diversion in the healthcare sector, highlighting the inefficiency of the current system in detecting such activities. To ensure public health safety, a system that tracks the entire healthcare supply chain is necessary. The Ethereum blockchain-based solution introduced in the paper ensures transparency, security, and data provenance while protecting patient privacy and confidentiality.