Blockchain-Enabled Drug Traceability in Healthcare Supply Chains Using Ethereum Smart Contracts and Location-Aware Tracking

DOI

https://www.doi.org/10.59256/indjcst.20260502112

Published In

Volume 5, Issue 2 (2026)

Published Online

May-August 2026

Pages

1021-1028

Article Type

Original Article

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Counterfeit and inadequately traced pharmaceutical products remain a persistent supply-chain risk because multiple independent organizations handle the same product while keeping separate, centrally administered records. This paper presents a blockchain-enabled drug traceability prototype that maintains a verifiable chain of custody from raw-material handling through manufacturing, distribution, retail sale, and consumer verification. A Solidity smart contract deployed on the Ethereum blockchain restricts stakeholder registration to an administrator, restricts drug creation and ownership transfer to registered participants, and permits transfer only by the account currently recorded as the drug's holder. A Django-based web application layers stakeholder dashboards, an order-generation workflow, and a public product-ID verification portal on top of the contract, with the Google Maps API used to visualize the location recorded at each custody transfer. The system was validated using four documented application-level functional scenarios — administrator authentication, order creation, end-to-end drug tracking, and rejection of an invalid product identifier — all of which produced the expected result, and an end-to-end walkthrough across all five stakeholder roles confirmed that the map-linked traceability report reflects the actual sequence of on-chain transfers. The smart contract itself was further exercised with an automated 14-scenario test suite in a Hardhat Ethereum sandbox, covering authorized and unauthorized registration, drug creation, ownership transfer across every supply-chain stage, and consumer verification; thirteen of the fourteen scenarios produced the expected result, and the remaining scenario empirically confirmed the contract's documented lack of batch-uniqueness enforcement rather than exposing an unexpected defect. A 40-transaction benchmark on the same sandbox additionally measured average gas consumption and confirmation latency for each core contract operation. Rather than reproducing the artificial-intelligence and Internet-of-Things capabilities described in the original project concept without implementation evidence, this paper restricts its claims to the blockchain-tracking, stakeholder-management, and location-visualization functions that the prototype actually demonstrates, and it examines the security properties and residual limitations of the smart-contract design. The results show that a compact, role-restricted smart contract can provide auditable custody transitions and consumer-facing provenance at prototype scale, while highlighting the engineering controls —batch-uniqueness enforcement, role-sequence validation, physical-product binding, and independent security auditing — required before production deployment.