Two-Layered Mechanism of Blockchain System for Sustainable Worldwide Control and Management of Highly Contagious Diseases

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak significantly impacted global health, resulting in widespread infections and fatalities. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET) program, focusing on respiratory pathogens, to prepare for future pandemics and achieve sustainable well-being around the world. Moreover, the WHO also encouraged countries to establish a National Action Plan for Health Security (NAPHS) to address various disasters and threats. Therefore, governments should develop the necessary systems aligned with NAPHS while maintaining compliance with PRET. Thus, to maintain global health and wellness, a platform for sharing medical data on highly contagious diseases worldwide, free from interference from individual countries, is critical for effective border control. In this paper, we introduce an efficient approach, i.e., a two-layer decentralized blockchain architecture. Our mechanism streamlines integration between national sovereignty and the WHO, enabling the secure and supervised exchange of pandemic data via a single global blockchain and multiple local blockchains. This blockchain framework has strong potential to enhance nations’ ability to prepare for and respond to future pandemics, ensuring the safety and health of their citizens. The bottom-layer local chains facilitate the collection of pandemic immunity data within their own countries, and the upper-layer global chain, with the assistance of the WHO, facilitates the worldwide exchange of these data if needed. Given the characteristics of decentralization and transparency in blockchain technology, and the WHO’s oversight, no government should worry that sensitive medical data will be manipulated or abused by superpowers on the global blockchain. It also highlights the importance of global collaboration in preventing and controlling contagious diseases. Furthermore, the performance of this system is assessed based on several sets of real-world data and requirements. We demonstrate that this global information-sharing mechanism can improve international health safety, provided it is supported by feasible and reasonable resources to handle transactional demands around the world.