SCeFSTA: Smart Contract enabled Fair, Secure, and Transparent Auction for Healthcare Transportation

The healthcare transport sector has progressed considerably in recent years, yet it continues to face persistent challenges such as payment, staffing, record redundancy, and resource waste. This paper proposes a blockchain-based auction system called Smart Contract enabled Fair, Secure, and Transparent Auction (SCeFSTA) that aims to address these problems and provide fair competition for healthcare transportation. SCeFSTA employs blockchain technology to create a transparent and secure auction-based platform that provides secure, immediate payment for services and promotes competition. It allows healthcare transportation providers to bid for services, ensuring that only cost-effective providers are selected. The smart contract ensures payments are made upon service completion, enhancing security for patients and providers. We follow a design science research approach to design the system after interviewing several key stakeholders in the healthcare transportation community. The blockchain-based data ledger reduces redundancy and waste while providing enhanced privacy and security. SCeFSTA has the potential to benefit the healthcare transportation field by creating a fair and efficient system that improves performance. We demonstrated the prototype to the first responder community, who understood the effectiveness. Through a series of rigorous system evaluations, we demonstrate that the proposed system could be deployed to healthcare transportation such as ambulance hire, and inter-facility patient transfer.