Tracking Child's Vaccines Using Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

Abstract

Recently, using blockchain technology to build immutable and decentralized system becomes a new trend. It offers immutability by tracking transactions which use some form of hash code in each block that links the current block to the previous one. Bitcoin was the first blockchain cryptography application, and within a decade it becomes popular in diverse application domains. Healthcare becomes a potential application area of the blockchain. It can help to preserve and protect highly sensitive private medical records while sharing in a decentralized manner. Many healthcare services are done manually, one of these services is keeping children vaccination records in a file. This record keeping is a paper based service; the health provider creates a file for the newborn at the time of his first vaccination. The child's family owns the file and health providers only update it by adding a new record of the next vaccination if they provide the service. This file could be lost or damaged, and losing the child's vaccine file could create many complexities for the child to get essential services such as registration at school, getting insurance, and other medical services. In our study, we propose a new application to track a child's vaccination records using blockchain Hyperledger Fabric. Our application will help to improve the vaccination process by ensuring the integrity of previous records in a more secure way.