Smart contracts and marketplace for just-in-time management of pharmaceutical drugs

Abstract

Blockchain technology has recently been used to provide a secure storage environment through a distributed ledger. Blockchain has increasingly been used in other sectors such as real estate and supply chains, where trust and transparency are paramount considerations. In the pharmaceutical industry, for operational efficiencies, information must be shared reliably between the various stakeholders. A significant limitation in the existing literature is the lack of work to address niche problems such as the just-in-time disposal of drugs that are close to expiry. To address this gap, we propose using blockchain technology. The architectural underpinning of the proposed system (PharmaBlock) is presented and discussed. The primary contribution of this paper is the use of an early warning system (EWS) coupled with marketplace to intelligently identify and dispose of near-expiry drugs. The EWS and marketplace are evaluated and benchmarked using an experimental setup. The result of this experimental has shown that over 90% of notifications were sent correctly and shown also more than 92% of the optimal prices were predicted correctly in PharmaBlock.