Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has disclosed the deficiencies and limitations of the existing manufacturing and supply chain systems used for medical devices and supplies. It enforces the necessity to accelerate the shift towards decentralized digital manufacturing and supply chain networks. This paper proposes a blockchain-based solution for decentralized digital manufacturing of medical devices and their supply. We develop Ethereum smart contracts to govern and track transactions in a decentralized, transparent, traceable, auditable, trustworthy, and secure manner. This allows overcoming certain issues hindering the transition towards decentralized digital manufacturing and supply, including trusted traceability, attestations, certifications, and secured intellectual property (IP) rights. We incorporate the decentralized storage of the InterPlanetary file system (IPFS) into the Ethereum blockchain to store and fetch Internet of things (IoT)-based devices records and additional manufacturing and supply details. We present the system architecture and algorithms along with their full implementation and testing details. Furthermore, we present cost and security analyses to show that the proposed solution is cost-efficient and resilient against well-known vulnerabilities and security attacks. We make our smart contracts code publicly available on GitHub.

Effectively managing the healthcare supply chain (HCSC) process is crucial for healthcare providers not only during pandemics such as COVID-19 but also in their normal operations. Despite significant advances in new technologies and treatment options providers still suffer from poor procurement, ordering, forecasting, and distribution practices. Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) are an important stakeholder in HCSC and benefit providers with cost savings, volume discounts, and vendor selection. However, the current GPO contract process is time-consuming and lacks efficiency. Hence, our proposed solution integrates blockchain technology and decentralized storage to promote transparency, streamlines communication with stakeholders, and minimize the procurement timeline while avoiding pricing discrepancies and inaccuracies. Our solution connects all the stakeholders such as manufacturer, GPO, distributor, and provider using Ethereum network. In this paper, we propose a blockchain solution using smart contracts to automate the GPO contract process. We propose a generic framework for contracting process in the HCSC with detailed algorithms depicting various interactions among HCSC stakeholders. The smart contract code was developed and tested using Remix IDE and the code is publicly shared via Github. We discuss various security risks and present detailed cost analysis of various transactions incurred by the stakeholders. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed blockchain-based solution is economically feasible as only a minimal transaction fee is expended by the stakeholders in the distributed network.