Blockchain in counterfeit Drug Prevention

By CIOReview | Tuesday, December 26, 2017

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Drug counterfeiting has become a major threat to the healthcare industry. In developing countries, almost 10 percent to 30 percent of drugs are counterfeited. It has become a difficult task for the government to control drug counterfeiting as even today it is hard to find the number of patients exposed to this crime. With almost $200 billion global annual loss caused by drug counterfeiting, it has become compulsory for the pharmaceutical industry to introduce a new system to end this fatal offense.

Blockchain can efficiently modify the pharmacy supply chain. The major specialty of blockchain is that they are robust enough to perform actions that other technologies cannot. Blockchain enables users to control their data which other solutions fail to provide. Particularly, in Pharma supply chain, transparency and traceability acts as a key to Blockchain. At present, pharmaceutical industry leveraging different software’s to manage drug supplies. With the advent of Blockchain systems, each member controls a node on the network and every transaction requires a consensus which can bring transformation in the drug supply chain.

In general, pharmaceutical companies use a central database to handle their supply chains. It has system administrators who have the license to edit, modify or delete records. Whereas in Blockchain, records are stable and cannot be changed in any way possible which helps in secured data transfer preventing human errors and making it cost efficient.

Counterfeit drug prevention, controlled substance monitoring, Cold Chain monitoring and active pharmaceutical ingredients are the major significant use-cases of Blockchain in Pharma supply chain. Deploying Blockchain, organizations can improve productivity and streamline testing and drug distribution making the organization more adaptable.