Taiwan's government, pharmacy associations and network of tech volunteers like SaaS-blockchain company FiO have received praise for staving off the spreading of COVID-19 in the densely-populated country.

Taiwanese health officials, assisted by private enterprises and organizations who answered its call, were able to swiftly distribute surgical masks to over 6,000 neighborhood "mom-and-pop" pharmacies. There, medically licensed volunteers helped beleaguered staff repackage bulk quantities into consumer-ready 2-pack units.

To facilitate this, authorities drew on the technical expertise of companies like SaaS platform FiO. FiO used its proprietary blockchain tool, which enables users to quickly create non-technical blockchain solutions by uploading ordinary spreadsheets, to help the project optimize its workflow.

FiO's team, led by senior engineer Joe Huang, built a heatmap on blockchain from scratch within 2 hours to authenticate and visualize incoming data. The heatmap located understaffed pharmacies and volunteers in real-time to help authorities play matchmaker and monitor the situation in real-time.

The volunteer relief system faced several daunting technical challenges: it had to be able to fend off DDoS attacks and swiftly authenticate, integrate and utilize incoming data on the fly as it was being uploaded nationwide. The system then had to play matchmaker by pairing short-handed pharmacies with nearby volunteers, and display the latest status of pharmacies in real-time to optimize workflow.

FiO's blockchain technology helped to establish immutable and reliably accurate on-chain data records, which could immediately be shared with decision-makers, without the need for laborious verification checks. It also helped crisis management teams set administrative levels and privileges, distributing information on a need-to-know basis, which helped relief units and workers to only focus on their tasks at hand.

The FiO platform, built on IBM's Hyperledger Fabric, allowed approved users to review the system's entire workflow and choose the most effective processes. System data is signed with its GPG private key to endorse its authenticity. To circumvent the slow transaction speed of public blockchains, FiO's hybrid-chain backed up all Ethereum-based data on its private blockchain, which can process a transaction in under 1 second.