Blockchain in Pharmaceutical Sector

Abstract

The pharmaceutical companies that manufacture, ship, and supply medical products face various challenges in tracing the products and identifying the counterfeit drugs in the supply chain system. Counterfeit drugs are one of the major consequences within the existing supply chain, which seriously affects human health and causes severe loss to the economy of the healthcare industry. Moreover, the traditional supply chain systems suffer from various challenges such as lack of transparency, limited tracing and tracking of products, privacy-related issues, and inaccurate information. The solution to the identified challenges is to leverage blockchain technology in the pharmaceutical system that adds traceability, visibility, privacy, and security to the drug supply chain. Blockchain technology is an advanced technology that stores medical product-related details in a completely decentralized manner and ensure transparency in the supply chain process. Thus, this chapter presents the drug discovery process, the pharmaceutical supply chain management system and its challenges, the need for clinical trials, and various preventive measures involved in the current pharmaceutical supply chain consortium. Then, we discuss the use case of a blockchain-based supply chain system for the pharmaceutical sector to track medical products and highlight its functionalities using the smart contract concept. The use case also explains the various smart contract concepts utilize to guarantee data provenance, eliminate the intermediatory authority, provide an immutability feature with security, maintain product traceability, and ensure transparency.