Developing a Reliable Service System of Charity Donation During the Covid-19 Outbreak

Abstract

Drawing upon the functional characteristics of blockchain technology, this paper envisages the feasibility and reliability of developing a charity donation service system loaded onto blockchain in response to the complex service demands encountered by charity operators due to the Covid-19 epidemic. With blockchain technology's support as the underlying data book, this paper focuses on the practical issues of charity donation fund and material allocation, as well as information release and sharing, charity donation organization, and organization self-management. The paper thereby discusses the key technologies in terms of overall structure design, specific service sector, and functional design of the donation service system and further summarizes the operational mechanism of the system as combined with the needs of help-seeking, receiving, and management users. It is argued that all the above proposals have the potential to alleviate the trust crisis of charity services in China in view of low transparency. The paper expects to provide a useful reference for charity business innovation propelled by blockchain technology. INDEX TERMS blockchain technology, the Covid-19 outbreak, charity donation, service system, reliability.

The applicability of blockchain technology in healthcare contexts to contain COVID-19 challenges

“…Seamless communication across the entire healthcare system ─ a transparent way to track patients' illnesses along with treatment history, equipment requirements, medical supply chains and so on ─ can improve the efficiency of the healthcare ecosystem. The illustrative examples in Table 1 demonstrate how blockchain contains some of the major challenges associated with the COVID-19 epidemic, spanning complications associated with medical data sharing and breaches of patients' data privacy (Lenert and McSwain, 2020;Zeng et al, 2020), the absence of real-time monitoring tools (Leung et al, 2020;Bi et al, 2020), counterfeit medical products and non-credible suppliers (Newton et al, 2020;Ranney et al, 2020;Gereffi, 2020), fallacious insurance claims and overly long insurance claim processes (Wang et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2020), misappropriations of funds (Wu and Zhu, 2020;Bin-Nashwan et al, 2020), and misinformation, rumors and fake news (Islam et al, 2020;Barua et al, 2020). The following discussion addresses each of the challenges in the light of the blockchain-based healthcare cases.…”

“…Several countries have reacted to the threat by initiating fundraising efforts to battle the effects of COVID-19 by assisting both frontline staff and vulnerable communities. In addition, it is important that sponsors and supporters play their role in fundraising for COVID-19 relief and contributions to those impacted in a transparent way (Wu and Zhu, 2020). Finally, states, humanitarian organizations and donors should function collectively to rebound while preserving donation processes with proper authentication.…”

“…Consequently, as an emerging technology, blockchain has been acknowledged as an enabler to aid the containment of various COVID-19 challenges. Challenges relevant to COVID-19 include complications associated with medical data sharing and breaches of patients' data privacy (Lenert and McSwain, 2020;Zeng et al, 2020), absence of real-time monitoring tools (Leung et al, 2020;Bi et al, 2020), counterfeit medical products and non-credible suppliers (Newton et al, 2020;Ranney et al, 2020;Gereffi, 2020), fallacious insurance claims and overly long claim processes (Wang et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2020), misappropriations of funds (Bin-Nashwan et al, 2020;Wu and Zhu, 2020), and misinformation, rumors, and fake news (Islam et al, 2020;Barua et al, 2020).…”

Blockchain as an enabling technology in the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review

“…For tourism [ 13 ] proposed a solution to check and record a trail of individuals’ immigration data about the coronavirus. In the donation area, [ 41 ] envisages the feasibility and reliability of developing a charity donation service system using blockchain technology in response to the complex service demands encountered by charity operators due to the COVID-19 epidemic and [ 42 ] demonstrated the blockchain impact on developing of charity 4.0, ensuring trust in philanthropy by avoiding potential cases of fraud and misappropriation of charitable funds as well as economic, financial and social repercussions.…”

“…As can be seen, the most adopted type of blockchain is hybrid. Examples are [ 41 ] that show that for a charitable donation service it is more appropriate to adopt a hybrid form involving public and alliance blockchain, combining decentralization and data authenticity, due to the complex conditions of relationship between various organizations and individuals. Likewise, [ 1 ] also state that a hybrid blockchain is more suitable for targeted public distribution systems.…”