Blockchain Enabled Healthcare Supply Chain: Review, Case Study and Future Opportunities

Blockchain is a major component of future smart healthcare that can improve the security, reliability, trust and automation of healthcare supply chain processes. Blockchain has several applications in areas such as medicine procurement, supply chain tracking, and drug traceability. In this study, we present a review of recent works in the area of Blockchain-enabled healthcare supply chains with a particular focus on pharmaceutical supply chains. We categorize the literature into three major areas namely, procurement, asset management, and system efficiency improvement. We also present a case study of efficient smart contracts for the pharmaceutical supply chain in which we identify different stakeholders of the pharmaceutical supply chain and develop different functions and tasks to be performed by each stakeholder and their interactions with each other. We implement the proposed smart contract in Remix Integrated Development Environment (IDE) using solidity language and evaluate the transaction cost of each function used in the smart contract. Lastly, we also present future opportunities on using Blockchain-enabled healthcare supply chain.

@article{Saad2025,
  title     = {Blockchain Enabled Healthcare Supply Chain: Review, Case Study and Future Opportunities},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {16},
  number    = {8},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Muhammad Saad and Kamran Ali and Muhammad Awais Javed and Ahmad Naseem Alvi and Ahmed Alfakeeh},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160888},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160888}
}