Multi-MedChain: Multi-Party Multi-Blockchain Medical Supply Chain Management System
Akanksha Saini, Arash Shaghaghi, Zhibo Huang, Salil S. Kanhere
TL;DR
The paper addresses secure, scalable management of the healthcare supply chain across multiple organizations using a three-layer, multi-party, multi-blockchain framework called Multi-MedChain. It combines cross-chain communication with dynamic smart-contract-based access control to preserve privacy on local ledgers while maintaining end-to-end traceability across the global chain. The architecture separates user, local, and global layers with five ACL-focused smart contracts (CC, CTC, VLC, ACC, REC) and employs off-chain storage to reduce on-chain data load. Evaluations on Ethereum with Ganache show feasible latency and gas performance, and the authors provide public source code for replication and extension.
Abstract
The challenges of healthcare supply chain management systems during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for an innovative and robust medical supply chain. The healthcare supply chain involves various stakeholders who must share information securely and actively. Regulatory and compliance reporting is also another crucial requirement for perishable products (e.g., pharmaceuticals) within a medical supply chain management system. Here, we propose Multi-MedChain as a three-layer multi-party, multi-blockchain (MPMB) framework utilizing smart contracts as a practical solution to address challenges in existing medical supply chain management systems. Multi-MedChain is a scalable supply chain management system for the healthcare domain that addresses end-to-end traceability, transparency, and collaborative access control to restrict access to private data. We have implemented our proposed system and report on our evaluation to highlight the practicality of the solution. The proposed solution is made publicly available.