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.

The rapid advancements in computing, storage, communications, and networking technologies have enabled the creation of Digital Twins (DTs). A DT is a digital representation of a real-world physical component, product, or equipment. A DT can be used for 3-D design, testing, simulation, and prototyping prior to the manufacturing of the physical component. Once a physical component is in operation, a DT can be used for configuration, monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics. It is expected that DTs will gain significant attention in the foreseeable future, and will play a key role in Industry 4.0. However, today’s approaches, systems, and technologies leveraged for the creation of DTs are mostly centralized and fall short of providing trusted data provenance, audit, and traceability. Also, data related to transactions, logs, and history are not secure or tamper-proof. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based creation process of DTs to guarantee secure and trusted traceability, accessibility, and immutability of transactions, logs, and data provenance. Our proposed approach uses smart contracts to govern and track transactions initiated by participants involved in the creation of DTs. Our approach also employs decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems to store and share DTs data. Moreover, we present details on our system design and architecture, implementation, and algorithms. Furthermore, we provide security and cost analysis, and show how our approach fulfills the requirements of DTs process creation. We make the smart contract code for creating DTs publicly available on Github.