Securing transparency and governance of organ supply chain through blockchain

Abstract

The governance and supply chain of organs is a complicated process throughout the life cycle; from the outset of pre-assessment of organ placement, it’s supply chain journey and important post donor analysis. Healthcare organisations face a huge challenge in the diverse collation of data that are held in systems which are mostly in silo operation and little scope for interoperability or accessibility of medical data. Lack of data access or trust in its accuracy makes the task more challenging and problematic for healthcare institutions whose preference undoubtably would be to focus their energies on the decision making side of a patient’s health in assessing organ donor suitability and urgency to organ match due to the receiving patient criticalities, rather than time and resources spent on validating data authenticity, etc. There are further complications that can occur in potential mix-ups of organs, contamination of DNA during organ transplant, non-ethical organ supply and audit trail transparency related to these activities. There is a serious question on how to create a single source of the truth and blockchain may provide the best possibilities. Blockchain is becoming a more sought after technology being used in the healthcare space due to its attributes of immutability, traceability and security whilst providing that assurance of transparency and audit trail. Blockchain looks to be a good fit to manage the supply chain of organ procurement/placement and an audit control method to analyse data in any pre or post operation event. Combined with the right processes, in the form of a cyber security framework/maturity model for the healthcare industry, would ensure that all those who signed up to the blockchain deployed for the supply chain logistics would respect the ethics and requirements and expect transparency for those authorised to access. However, some challenges exist in GDPR compliancy of data that would exist on a certain proposed blockchain models and needs further exploring with regards to benefits in data held off-chain.