Blockchain-oriented Inter-organizational Collaboration between Healthcare Providers to Handle the COVID-19 Process

Collaborative business activities have aroused great interest from organizations because of the benefits they offer. However, sharing data, services, and resources and exposing them to external use can prevent organizations involved in collaboration from being engaged. Therefore, the need for advanced mechanisms to ensure trust between the different parties involved is paramount. In this context, blockchain and smart contracts are promising solutions for performing choreography processes. However, the seamless integration of these technologies as non-functional requirements in the design and implementation phases of inter-organizational collaborative activities is a challenging task, as reported in the literature. Consequently, we aim in the proposed approach to extend the modeling and implementation of the choreography lifecycle based on service-oriented processes. This is fulfilled by integrating blockchain transactions and smart contract calls, to allow collaboration and interoperability between different entities while guaranteeing trust and auditability. Moreover, to conduct this extension efficiently we use a BPMN choreography diagram combined with Finite State Automata to ensure a meticulous modeling which targets the processes' internal interactions. Hyperledger Fabric is used as a permissioned blockchain for proof-of-concept implementation. A use case of COVID-19 collaborative processes is used to experiment our approach, which aims to guarantee a fluid collaboration between healthcare providers and epidemiological entities at a national scale in Morocco.