Blockchain Technology-Based Management of Blood and Its Products - A Case Study in Vietnam

Blood and its products are one of the products that have not found an alternative and play a huge role in the treatment of diseases today. The current supply is obtained from the volunteers' blood (called donors). However, this supply is also very limited and must go through a rigorous inspection process before reaching the recipient. Depending on the type of product extracted from the blood (e.g., red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, plasma), we have different preservation procedures and requirements (e.g., duration, temperature, humidity). Therefore, it is extremely necessary to build blood and its products management system. The process is now done manually, where all data entry is done by medical staff without the technique supported. Furthermore, data relating to donors and the centrally stored blood donation process are difficult to assess reliably. In addition to the above difficulties, developing countries (including Vietnam) face infrastructural barriers in managing the supply chain w.r.t blood and its products. In this paper, we introduce a blockchain technology-based blood and its products management model applied to provinces/cities in Vietnam. Specifically, the paper introduces the limitation of the current blood collection and blood-based treatment process, thereby proposing a new approach based on blockchain technology. We also implemented our proofs-of-concept on the Hyperledger Fabric platform. This paper is considered the first attempt to introduce blockchain-based blood and blood product management processes to developing countries (i.e., Vietnam).