Pharma supply chain blockchain
The CK Birla Group. Automotive Banking High Tech Manufacturing. As the world grapples with Coronavirus, the need for medical supplies has increased like never before. COVID is one of the many factors that add to this rapid surge in demand. Cold chain logistics is a crucial area where these companies face a significant risk of product losses occurring due to monitoring and logistic errors.
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Content:
- Why Big Pharma Is Betting on Blockchain
- Blockchain: The future of pharma supply chains?
- IBM, KPMG, Merck, Walmart team up for drug supply chain blockchain pilot
- Blockchain innovation in pharmaceutical use cases: PharmaLedger and Mytigate
- Blockchain in Supply Chain of Pharmaceutical Industry – Key element for Industry 4.0
- Infosys Pharma Supply Chain Distributed Application
- Blockchain Your Supply Chain: Advantages for Pharmaceutical and Logistics Executives
Why Big Pharma Is Betting on Blockchain
The Covid crisis exposed major cracks in medical supply chains — essentials were hard to come by, and verification that goods were what they were advertised to be was a struggle. One possible solution to these problems is blockchain. The advantage of a blockchain-based system is that competitors can collaborate on a shared platform without sharing sensitive information, allowing them to trace the provenance of supplies, verify their status, and reduce friction throughout the supply chain.
There is, of course, a catch: Blockchains are an ecosystem technology and only bring benefit when the technology is not only broadly adopted but when physical systems work with it. To make that happen, broadly adopted standards are necessary.
Since the early days of the Covid pandemic, world-class hospitals from New York to Atlanta to San Francisco struggled with shortages of basic safety equipment. Masks, gowns, and face shields have all been in short supply, and the race to get more has meant hospital staff and public officials desperately searching for reliable suppliers. Elsewhere on the front lines, there have been critical shortages in the test kits that experts agree are essential to reopening economies the world over.
They needed to source new vendors and find and reallocate supplies quickly — and this pressure brought new visibility to long-festering problems in the medical supply chain. In the U. As a result, theft and quality control issues are common, and regulators and distributors struggle to locate substandard products that have entered the system. The World Health Organization estimates that one in 10 medical products — including pills, vaccines, and diagnostic kits — are substandard or falsified in low- and middle- income countries.
In other regions, theft is the greater problem. BSI Group, the national standards body of the U. When we do produce effective treatments or, eventually, a vaccine, millions — and even billions — of people around the world will simultaneously want the same thing, and it will be in limited supply.
To fix some of these supply chain vulnerabilities, the industry is turning to blockchain technology. With a blockchain — which can make it cheaper, easier, and faster to verify what is true when a business process spans organizations with competing interests — companies can safely work together in a shared, permanent ledger.
They can do this without giving up control of or even revealing their data, as mathematical proof of data can stand in as a trustworthy proxy for actual data. Instead of being owned and managed by a single company that everyone must trust, the ledger is governed by all members of a network. Because this makes it possible to delegate the work of checks and balances to cryptography and code, blockchains can reduce friction, expose fraud, and assure product authenticity with new speed.
The advantage of a blockchain-based system is that competitors can collaborate on a shared platform to, say, raise drug safety without sharing sensitive information. Chronicled, a startup, provides the underlying technology. The first solution in production from MediLedger is a product verification system that makes it easier to verify that a returned drug is authentic — a common, but difficult process.
According to the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, approximately 60 million units of saleable drugs are returned annually. Using blockchain, wholesale distributors can make the same verification in less than a second using a barcode scanner, so product can be quickly put back into commercial distribution, and manufacturers maintain control of their data. This rapid serial number verification can also be used to help hospitals and pharmacies.
With no infrastructure beyond a web browser and a barcode scanner, staff can verify that a drug is authentic as it is placed on the shelf. Counterfeiters could still copy barcodes in an attempt to pass drugs off as legitimate — but the ledger will flag and permanently record suspicious activity.
With the blockchain, this process can be done without revealing confidential business intelligence to anyone in the ecosystem. MediLedger recently completed a pilot using a blockchain for track and trace with 25 participants, including retailers Walgreens and Walmart, transportation provider FedEx, standards organization GS1, wholesale distributors including AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health, and manufacturers ranging in size from employees to , Along the way, auditing is automated and embedded, flagging problems and who has custody as it happens.
There is, of course, a catch: Blockchains are an ecosystem technology and only bring benefit when the technology is not only broadly adopted, but when physical systems work with it. More industry standards are needed to make it all truly interoperable.
In some of the countries with the greatest fraud, serialized numbers are not yet required on a box of drugs; pharmacies move drugs into hoppers before they repackage them; hospitals use dispensing systems.
Full track and trace, for example, would need to connect the network to these systems. However, there are new, strong incentives adding to the pressure for change. New regulation is amplifying pressure for the pharmaceutical industry to work better together on developing standards.
The E. With more granular visibility, stakeholders could better zero in on clogs in supply chains, more quickly locate and remove expired, damaged, or fraudulent products, see where supplies are low, and efficiently redistribute inventory to where it is needed most. This will most certainly not be our last global health crisis. Blockchains could not only help us increase agility during extraordinary black swan events, but also help us operate better in day-to-day operations. While this work is focused on the pharmaceutical industry, the underlying protocol can be repurposed and customized to advance any supply chain — from the personal protective equipment that has been in such short supply to products in any industry.
As we wake up to the fact that our health and economic welfare is interconnected with those thousands of miles away, it becomes clearer that we need to leverage our global resources to effectively fight large-scale problems. Blockchains could help us do this more safely and efficiently. If our content helps you to contend with coronavirus and other challenges, please consider subscribing to HBR.
A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Supply chain management. The pandemic has exposed major cracks in medical supply chains. Read more on Supply chain management or related topics Technology and analytics , Blockchain , Healthcare sector and Information technology and telecom sector.
Alison McCauley is the CEO of Unblocked Future , a firm that helps organizations pushing the frontier of emerging technology to communicate vision, build ecosystems, and go to market. Partner Center.
Blockchain: The future of pharma supply chains?
In the last couple of years, there has been a shift in perception when it comes to blockchain technology. Once thought of as being a synonym for cryptocurrencies, blockchain has gradually earned its place as an important emerging technology on par with artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing. Exciting developments in recent years have attracted interest from various industries, with major and smaller players in those sectors exploring ways to utilize the technology to their advantage. One sector that seems primed for a blockchain-powered overhaul is the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors of the global economy and for a good reason.
IBM, KPMG, Merck, Walmart team up for drug supply chain blockchain pilot
Since the start of the pandemic, the pharmaceutical supply chain has been under scrutiny. In the early days of Covid, the main problem was drug shortages, as manufacturers faced disruptions to their supply of raw materials , and factories closed around the world. Later, this affected the companies developing vaccines, which needed hard-to-source equipment such as filters and bioreactor bags. In some cases, companies lacked full visibility of their stock. Then, as vaccination programmes got underway, the cold chain came into focus. Despite herculean efforts from all concerned, the scale and urgency of the rollout placed existing systems under pressure. You need to know there was consistency throughout that time period. Pharma supply chains, he explains, depend on a complex set of processes, often involving a range of participants spread across numerous locations.
Blockchain innovation in pharmaceutical use cases: PharmaLedger and Mytigate
The entire pharmaceutical industry has been booming, from the manufacturing of clinical trial materials to support research studies to the regulated medicines on the pharmacy shelves. It has been one of the top industry performers of the past three decades. By maintaining the highest safety and quality standards, many pharma business units along the supply chain, such as research and development materials, manufacturing, sales and marketing, have enjoyed rising profits. Lost ingredients in the supply chain, inactive chemicals due to inefficient cold-chain monitoring, wrongly prescribed medicines from faulty computer systems, counterfeit medicines because of gaps in security — all of these significant challenges have created demand for utilization of the latest technology to maintain visibility across the supply chain.
Blockchain in Supply Chain of Pharmaceutical Industry – Key element for Industry 4.0
IBM announced its latest blockchain initiative today. These four companies are coming together to help come up with a solution to track certain drugs as they move through a supply chain. IBM is acting as the technology partner, KPMG brings a deep understanding of the compliance issues, Merk is of course a drug company and Walmart would be a drug distributor through its pharmacies and care clinics. The idea is to give each drug package a unique identifier that you can track through the supply chain from manufacturer to pharmacy to consumer. Seems simple enough, but the fact is that companies are loathe to share any data with one another.
Infosys Pharma Supply Chain Distributed Application
The Covid crisis exposed major cracks in medical supply chains — essentials were hard to come by, and verification that goods were what they were advertised to be was a struggle. One possible solution to these problems is blockchain. The advantage of a blockchain-based system is that competitors can collaborate on a shared platform without sharing sensitive information, allowing them to trace the provenance of supplies, verify their status, and reduce friction throughout the supply chain. There is, of course, a catch: Blockchains are an ecosystem technology and only bring benefit when the technology is not only broadly adopted but when physical systems work with it. To make that happen, broadly adopted standards are necessary.
Blockchain Your Supply Chain: Advantages for Pharmaceutical and Logistics Executives
Despite early confusion about the technology, suppliers are developing network frameworks and apps that will make blockchain an essential part of food and pharma industries. This month, the Blockchain Research Institute released a case study on electronics manufacturer Foxconn, which has been experimenting with blockchain technology using advanced cryptographic techniques and decentralized networks to build a trusted relationship among its suppliers, partners, factories and customers. According to the report, it appears that Foxconn is successfully leveraging blockchain technology as a tool for the movement of money, goods and agreements.
End-to-End Supply Chain Insight. Blockchain is a software which provides a digital ledger system to log and record transactions by grouping them into chronologically-ordered blocks. These blocks are linked and secured on a peer to peer network using cryptography technology. As the technology is evenly distributed across a network of multiple computers, it has no centralized point of entry, giving added security from cyber threats. The system is also built to be transparent and secure; those within the chain can view the individual block transactions but cannot alter those they are not a part of, they can only add further detail.
Blockchain has the potential to transform healthcare in general and the pharmacy supply chain in particular. The distributed ledger technology could offer legislative, logistical and patient safety benefits for pharmaceutical supply chain management. From a regulatory perspective in the United States, blockchain technological and structural capabilities, in fact, extraordinarily map to the key requirements of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act. The DSCSA outlines a year timeframe that will require elements including medication track-and-trace, product verification and notification of stakeholders about illegitimate drugs. A shared ledger of information to enable each of these steps is a foundational aspect of blockchain technology. Counterfeit drug prevention is a major use-case for blockchain in healthcare, said Tapan Mehta, market development executive, healthcare and life sciences services practice, at DMI, a mobile technology and services company. Potential applications for blockchain in the pharmaceutical industry already are being explored.
Leading the pharmaceutical development CMC - chemistry, manufacturing, and controls and clinical supply chain function at Avanir Pharmaceuticals, Arul Joseph - alongside his team - manages the development, manufacturing, testing, and packaging of drug substances and drug products, and the distribution of drug products to sites supporting clinical studies. Once added, it cannot be altered or deleted and is visible to all participants. It can increase end-to-end visibility of the supply chain with data. Blockchain can bridge barriers between stakeholders by giving all parties the same, real-time, accurate view of the supply chain.
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