A Transparent and Traceable Coverage Analysis Model for Vaccine Supply-Chain Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Tracing the vaccines from the manufacturing labs till the health centers administering doses to child is a cumbersome process with the involvement of large number of stakeholders and with multiple levels of book-keeping mechanisms. This work primarily focuses on the problem of traceability of immunization vaccines from manufacturing facility, through the distribution mechanisms in cold storage network and the vaccine handling/administration facilities, till the end consumer in the Indian context. The proposed research named, Immunochain is a state-of-the-art big data and blockchain technologies powered, mobile/web-enabled vaccine traceability solution for immunization programs in India. It is vendor neutral, scalable, replicable, and reusable across different immunization programs in any geographical context. Experiments and pilot testing on Indian geography indicates that the proposed approach outperforms some of the existing approaches in vaccine traceability and record management systems.