Pharmaceutical

How can the blockchain technology help pharmaceutical companies to enhance the integrity, transparency, and efficiency of their drug development and supply processes?

The acquisition of medical data poses a major challenge for pharmaceutical research. The blockchain enables a private, secure and transparent data exchange. While patients fully control what information they want to reveal, the combined data from different health care providers would allow researchers to evaluate existing therapies better, manage clinical trials more efficiently and come up with new treatments better suited to patients’ needs.

The same properties of the blockchain also offer a solution to fight counterfeit medication through greater visibility of the supply chain. Information about the origin and records of a specific drug as it moves along the supply chain would be accessible to all parties and enable them to verify authenticity at every step with minimal overhead.

Many pharmaceutical companies, since 2015, have imposed the EFPIA transparency codex and implemented a process to disclose all transactions with health care professionals and organizations. Due to the complexity and diversity of these interactions, the publishing process is expensive and prone to error. The usage of smart contracts or even decentralized autonomous organizations to manage these interactions between the different parties would reduce the probability of mistakes, increase the credibility, and make the entire process more efficient.