BloodMan-Chain: A Management of Blood and Its Products Transportation Based on Blockchain Approach

Abstract

Today’s rapidly increasing demand, product severity, strict age and handling requirements, and operational system preservation requirements, make blood and its products supply chain management become a complex but fundamental matter. On the other hand, blood and its products are one of the products that have not found an alternative and play a massive role in the treatment of diseases today. The current supply is obtained from only the blood of volunteers (known as donors). In particular, depending on the type of product extracted from the blood (e.g. red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, plasma). They require different procedures and storage environments (e.g. time, temperature, humidity). However, the current blood management processes are done manually - where all data entry is done by medical staff. Furthermore, data related to the entire blood donation process (e.g., blood donors, blood recipients, blood inventories) are centrally stored and are difficult to assess reliably. Ensuring centralised data security is extremely difficult because of stealing personal information or losing data. To address these limitations, in this paper, we introduce the blood management process based on blockchain technology and store data in a decentralized distributed ledger called BloodMan-Chain. Specifically, we target two main contributions: i) we design the BloodMan-Chain model to manage all relevant information about blood and its products based on blockchain technology, and ii) we implement the proof-of-concept of BloodMan-Chain by Hyperledger Fabric and evaluate this in the two scenarios (i.e., data creation and data access).