A Blockchain based model for Curbing Doctors Shopping and Ensuring Provenance Management

摘要

Blockchain technology has been increasingly being recognized nowadays by healthcare industry as it guarantees precision with its secure cryptology framework and safeguards against fraud and forgery. The healthcare field is facing a major problem of Prescription Drug Abuse or Doctors shopping that entails drug misuse and leading to fatality of a large number of people worldwide. Painkillers like Oxycodone and Vicodin which are over prescribed by doctors are among the most abused legal drugs alongside sleeping pills and anxiety medication. For this reason there is an imminent need to devise a system that identifies and monitors prescription abuse. Blockchain technology's decentralisation and auditability offers a promising solution to drug tracking that not only makes prescriptions safer but also guarantees a reliable transaction history of medical records. Blockchain is one of the best ways to ensure transparency, integrity and authenticity of pharmacy or doctor's office distribution of drugs. In this research, we propose a novel drug supply chain integrity management by employing Hyperledger Fabric as the underlying blockchain platform and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as the decentralised file system to prevent prescription abuse. Through this approach, it is possible to recognize and track doctor's shopping and pharmacy hopping patients in an attempt to misuse drugs. The proposed system viz HealthChain solves this problem by performing drug tracking transactions by employing smart contract functionality on a blockchain to create a smart health care ecosystem. HealthChain seeks to improve the way opioid and prescriptions are administered and distributed by creating a cryptographically secure and reliable framework for physicians, pharmacists and patients.