A Blockchain Based Solution for Medication Anti-Counterfeiting and Traceability

Abstract

Medication quality and safety are crucial to the health of the public. Responding to the urgent need for medication information provenance and anti-counterfeiting, this study proposes a blockchain based method for medication information storage, inquiry, and anti-counterfeiting along a medication supply chain. Leveraging the features of decentralization, tamper-proof, traceability, and participative node maintenance of blockchain technology, the proposed method can assure the transparency and openness of medication supply chains. An access control policy model based on smart contract is designed to prevent medication information from being altered or disclosed at nodes of the blockchain. In addition, a pointaccumulation upgrade/downgrade mechanism is introduced to improve the consensus mechanism. The proposed solution eliminates the needs for centralized institutions and third-party organizations, and provides a full record of the medication circulation process. Our simulation results show that efficiency and security are enhanced by the improved consensus algorithm and access control mechanism. As a result, our method can render high level of security and privacy protection that is critical to the integrity of a medication information management system.

Optimized User-Friendly Transaction Time Management in the Blockchain Distributed Energy Market

“…This satisfies the node aggregate condition for the application of pBFT. It states that the total number of malicious nodes must be less than one-third of the total node population saddled with a validation task [34]. The possible minimum (simplest) value of the total node population, whose less-than-one-third value (number of the malicious node) is an integer, is 4.…”

Enhancing Traceability of Infectious Diseases: A Blockchain-Based Approach

“…In essence, as pointed out by Maxmen ( Maxmen, 2018 ), blockchain is like a decentralized, distributed database with strong cryptographic algorithms that assure its data not be modified or forged. The time stamps in a blockchain allow the blockchain to record, in time sequence, the delivery and confirmation history of each transaction, and the other related information and data in the transaction, thereby realizing chain-wise arrangement of data ( Zhu et al., 2020 ).…”

Security of Healthcare Data Using Blockchains

“…In (Zhu et al, 2020), the authors propose a solution to prevent counterfeiting medication information in the supply chain. Here, blockchain technology is used to track the medication distribution within the nodes comprising manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies, hospitals, doctors, and regulators.…”

“…Also, the experiment and analysis are done with a very limited number of nodes. (Zhu et al, 2020) Pu+Pr ‡…”