A Blockchain Platform for Vaccine Beneficiary Registration, Side Effects, Cold Supply Chain, and Personnel Training and Employment Management

The world has faced pandemics throughout its history. The most recent, COVID-19, took lives and disrupted healthcare and economies. COVID-19 vaccine programs were launched worldwide; however, the record time in which vaccines were developed raises questions about side effects and their severity. Also, as vaccines are delicate medical products, their cold supply chain must be continuously tracked and monitored to ensure their efficacy. Moreover, vaccine supply chain management is complex and requires trained staff to handle its different activities. As such, it is important to connect beneficiaries’ symptoms and registration systems with the vaccine supply chain to enable healthcare authorities to investigate whether observed side effects may be linked to cold chain handling conditions or production factors. Consequently, the need arises for a system that manages trained personnel certificate generation, which could also be used as a verification tool for employing the right experts for the right job. Therefore, our study developed a blockchain platform that integrates individuals’ registration and side effect data with vaccine cold supply chain information. The developed platform also includes a certification system for cold supply chain personnel training to support authenticated certificate generation and role assignment management. Blockchain was selected due to its features of security, decentralization, traceability, and trust. The key contributions of this work lie in providing a digital collaborative management and data tracing platform for vaccine side effects that are linked to beneficiaries’ registration and cold supply chain data to enable healthcare authorities to investigate whether any observed side effects may be linked to cold chain handling conditions or production factors while managing the issuance of certificates for trained cold supply chain personnel and controlling their employment in the correct chain(s). Our platform creates training certificate IDs without a central entity to regulate certificate generation and uses the created certificate information to control the employment of personnel with the appropriate training in the right chain to perform the right role. Our platform identified personnel employed in any chain where violations were recorded and side effects were subsequently reported, and presents their training and employment data, providing the interconnected data record necessary for accountability. The platform was tested successfully, producing the desired outcome of secure, traceable, and transparent vaccine data sharing, linking, and verification.