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Tag: blockchain in pharma

Can Blockchain Technology Boost The Quality of Clinical Research?

Posted on by Shipra

Today, we are going to shed some light on how blockchain boost clinical research quality. Researchers are facing various challenges regarding trust and transparency in clinical data. The huge amounts of data created  in clinical trials are outpacing the ability of legacy data-management platforms to administer the competing needs of data sharing, patient privacy, and data integrity

The tricky and unpredictable nature of the clinical trial process is a crucial driver of high costs for pharmaceutical drugs. Many pharmaceutical companies aim to create  2-3 new drugs per year, to rationalize the costs of drug development. However, the success rate with clinical trials decreases the chances of a successful product to nearly zero.

This huge uncertainty results in higher prices for everyone, from the investigator to the end consumer.

Can Blockchain Boost Clinical Research Quality? How?

Today, there is a great demand for enterprise blockchain development solutions and blockchain development companies. Blockchain development technology is appearing as an innovative tool across all areas of industry. Fortunately,  blockchain technology for pharmaceutical industry is bringing significant attention in the research community that can provide solutions to all of these problems.     

blockchain clinical research quality

Blockchain technology utilizes a distributed computer network platform that enables databases to store time-stamped transaction records and documents. Each server in the network processes and verifies each data entry, then archives all transactions, along with the history trail.

The best part about blockchain is that data stored in a blockchain is essentially impossible to hack, temper, or steal. This is because the ledger is not kept on a single repository, but is spread throughout multiple databases in replicate copies. These verification requirements ensure that stored data remains intact and immutable. The blockchain technology is a safe and secure platform for storing and processing all types of valuable information, from clinical trial analysis results to business workflow documents to patients’ medical data and blueprints of genetic information.      

Blockchain in Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals

Blockchain development solutions in healthcare possess the capability to solve some of the biggest challenges in the industry. It enables real-time visibility into the entire clinical trial supply chain.

“Blockchain technology has the potential to solve many challenges facing clinical trial processes, such as accurately reproducing and sharing data, privacy concerns, and patient enrollment strategies”, said Caron Dhillon health care analyst at Results Healthcare.

“Perhaps most importantly, through its ability to track events in chronological order and with full transparency, blockchain allows for a high level of data authenticity throughout the whole document flow in a clinical trial, ensuring the trust of the data and its integrity,” she told us.       

How Blockchain Technology Could Help in Clinical Trials?

blockchain in clinical trials

Improving patient recruitment

Blockchain in healthcare has the capacity to dramatically enhance the patient recruitment process. With blockchain solutions, one could share patient information with pharmaceutical or contract research organizations without disclosing the patient’s identity. This could provide more information about potential participants who are likely to be motivated to join a study.

Maintaining medical privacy

Blockchain technology can develop a secure tracking system for any data generated from patient-physician interactions. Blockchain anonymity allows storing and sharing of electronic health record (EHR) data transparently, along with maintaining patient privacy. This could free huge amounts of data for clinical research.

Securing data integrity

Good quality data from clinical trials requires security and an immutable audit trail. Blockchain secures data integrity with cryptographic validation of each transaction.

Read More: How Blockchain Projects Battle for Healthcare Data Protection

Traceability of consent

In a recent concept study, “researchers from the University of Paris and Columbia University applied cryptographic validation to transactions related to patient consent and the clinical research protocol for a fake experimental study. Each patient consent was time-stamped on the blockchain, as were consent renewals for protocol revisions. The resulting master data collection traced each consent to a version of the revised protocol. The result was a cryptographic representation of the real consent and protocol document data that can be verified on the web”.

Read More: How Blockchain Can Help Fight the Problem of Fake and Counterfeit Drugs?

Closing thoughts:

Let’s make a long story short! Yes, blockchain can boost clinical research quality. Three of the biggest pharmaceutical conglomerates – Pfizer, Amgen, and Sanofi – are working together to find the best ways to employ blockchain technology, from storing safe data to speeding up clinical trials and ultimately lowering drug development costs.  What are your thoughts on how can blockchain boost clinical research quality? In case of any queries, feel free to approach us for a no-obligation FREE consultation!                  

How Blockchain Can Help Fight The Problem Of Fake And Counterfeit Drugs?

Posted on by Shipra

In the healthcare industry, where ever loopholes are available in the pharma supply chain, mal-practitioners try to counterfeit original drugs with fraudulent drugs. Hence, blockchain in drug supply chain is now the talk of the town.

According to the report submitted by World Health Organization (WHO), 15% to 30% of the total drugs sold in the world account to fake or counterfeit drugs, especially in the developing countries.

In industrialized countries, counterfeit drugs account to a minimum of 1% in every single pharma supply chain.

If healthcare industry keeps progressing with counterfeit drugs at this rate, the world is only going to get worse. Blockchain in drug supply chain, serves to take care of the healthcare industry in fighting against fake and counterfeit drugs. It hurts even to imagine counterfeit drugs for cancer. In the recent years, WHO report states that there has been a significant increase in medicinal theft and selling of uncertified drugs.

Enterprise blockchain development for medicines focus on ensuring that pharmaceutical retailers sell only the genuinely certified and verified drugs.

To avoid chronic spread of epidemic diseases and fighting medical fraud, blockchain is one of the best solutions. With the help of blockchain technology, identifying toxic ingredients and identifying counterfeit ingredients deviated from original prescription can be identified before any sales.

Keep reading to know how blockchain in drug supply chain fights to ensure that a safe and sound healthcare service is provided.

Role of Blockchain in Drug Supply Chain To Fight Fake And Counterfeit Drugs

Here is how blockchain is re-structuring medical industry to fight fake and counterfeit drugs.

blockchain in drug supply chain

Identify The Source of Origin For Every Drug

One of the major reasons for counterfeit drugs to enter the industry of healthcare is due to the obstacles in identifying the original source from where the drugs are originating from. If the location of the manufacturer and supplier of the drugs can be identified with appropriate certifications, that is already a big step towards stopping production of counterfeit drugs.

Blockchain in drug supply chain helps to identify manufacturers, suppliers and vendors with authenticated identity and certification via its proof of work, proof of stake and proof of providence.

Detail recording of data with smart contracts

One of the major challenges faced in healthcare and medical industry as a whole is the handling of discrepancies in data stored. Every medical supply chain and operation goes through a channel involving one too many personnel and technology devices. Retrieving necessary drug data is traditionally hard because information is stored in multiple systems at different locations and even time zones.

Smart contracts that operate with blockchain aims at putting a full stop confusion caused due to storage of information in multiple systems. Smart contracts combine all drug manufacturers and suppliers under one smart system. Starting from drug dispatch till end delivery location, all transactions and operations can be monitored in real-time.

Read More: Insights of Blockchain Technology in Drug Discovery

Seek out the ingredients of every drug sold

One another major factors that influence fraudulent activities to occur in the healthcare industry is the failure to track minutest details such as ingredients used to manufacture drugs. Not because pharmaceuticals didn’t want to track such details. Rather it was because information of drug manufacturing was spread and it was time consuming to get too many approvals to have visibility in ingredients used.

With blockchain, the process or attaining such details is simplified. Using smart contracts and proof of authenticity, every drug detail will be visible to everyone. Manufacturers can even protect the ingredient details with encryption installation of QR codes in drugs sold.

Ensures regulatory compliance

According to World Health Organization (WHO), today, most of the drugs are exported from country to country due to differences in manufacturing costs, raw material availability, etc.

Blockchain ensures that every drug manufactured and sold is compliant with the standard regulations set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

With blockchain, medical industry can say goodbye to long and lengthy paperwork and time-consuming processes of getting drugs approved or process of verifying drug quality.

Transparency in supply chain

Pharmacist Panel

Blockchain based Digital Ledger Technology (DLT) is one way to counterfeit fake drugs extensively in medical industry. DLT integrated with (Internet of Things) IoT allows data transfer at the speed of light without compromising transparency. Each user gets to create their own node system and each information is split between different nodes with its own encryption and decryption key.

Thus, everyone involved within a particular drug supply can see all transactions anytime from anywhere without accessibility to manipulate any data.

Integration with IoT for temperature-controlled shipment  

Certain drugs require highly cold-based environment to ensure preservation of ingredients. Different drugs have different temperature and packaging requirements. Traditionally, such drugs were transported in temperature-controlled trucks and shipment containers but how far temperature was controlled is not visible. For instance, maybe the suppler decided to control the temperature in secrecy only for half of the shipment journey to save cost. This is hard to identify.

With blockchain, now consumers and pharmacies can track and monitor the temperature-controlled environment throughout the shipment journey.

Avoid glitching of networks

Storing medical information and drug data in a centralized system has higher chances of getting hacked and being vulnerable to security threats. This is because all information is under one single system maintained and controlled by one server. If the server fails or system fails, the consequences maybe catastrophic in medical industry.

Blockchain stores information under one platform but with multiple systems and each system with a group of clusters and nodes each of within which the information is spread. Thus, even when one system fails, the drug information can be accessed from another system.

Conclusion: Blockchain protects medical industry against harmful drugs

blockhain for medicines

Saving life and maintaining a good health-life balance is of the utmost importance today. All of us are busy with our respective daily chores and professional works. We may not have the time to wait for longer periods of time to identify drug authenticity and ingredient originality. But with blockchain in drug supply chain, every one of us get the accessibility to stay informed and take care of health in a smarter way with smarter drugs.

Reducing transactional costs and managing supply chain end-to-end is possible with blockchain which also helps to reduce fake drugs in the process. Let us know your perceptions and views on approaches provided through blockchain in drug supply chain to fight against counterfeit drugs.