Fortifying Healthcare Supply Chain Resilience with Blockchain, Provider Contracts, and Analytics in a DevOps Ecosystem

Abstract

Healthcare supply chains face inefficiencies, transparency gaps, and fraud, with counterfeit drugs, which cost $200 billion annually and causing 1 million deaths. This paper proposes an integrated framework combining Ethereum Proof of Stake (PoS), predictive analytics, provider contracts, and DevOps to enhance resilience. Smart contracts ensure immutable tracking and compliance, while Exponential Smoothing and Isolation Forest enable demand forecasting (85% accuracy) and anomaly detection (4.8% anomalies). Dockerized deployment achieves 99.97% uptime. A proof-of-concept (PoC) simulating a vaccine supply chain with 10,000 items achieved 12.78 transactions per second, 0.060-second latency (99.98% faster than manual processes), and 10% fraud reduction. FHIR-compliant APIs reduced data exchange time to 0.026 seconds per item, cutting silos by 90%. Despite challenges like high simulated gas costs, the framework offers a scalable, transparent solution, reducing stockouts by 15% and enhancing patient safety. This work advances prior studies by holistically addressing traceability, compliance, and efficiency, paving the way for real-world healthcare adoption.