Blockchains in Healthcare & Life Sciences

Blockchain is a highly potent technology that leverages Distributed Ledger among different parties and also helps them secure trust unanimously. This entrant technology has the potential to impact all facets of business and commerce across all industries. Decentralized Applications for Healthcare and Life Sciences are a result of consistent innovation by technology leaders from the healthcare side of the business.

What is the massive problem of drug counterfeiting faced by the healthcare and life sciences industry?

The core problem of drug counterfeiting in the healthcare industry is one of the most significant challenges faced by the respective industry in the present day. The problem is that there is a long supply chain starting from the raw material supplier for medicines and ending up with the patients. This is a highly vulnerable channel through which people and groups with malicious intentions of introducing spurious drugs are consistently working on flooding the circuit with counterfeit drugs. There is no policing and control over the extended supply chain, the lucrative benefits of drug counterfeiting motivate people with malicious intentions to manufacture duplicate drugs of low quality and compromised drug potential. Further, they supply them disguised among the large lots of original, high-quality medicines.

Widespread health issues

Counterfeit drugs when reaching the patients or consumers in need put them at considerable health risk due to quality or even the wrong drug being distributed disguised in original medicines. It is a huge matter of concern for the healthcare industry as it causes deaths and several other severe illnesses that people suffered due to the consumption of counterfeit drugs. It is having a straight effect on the reputation and brand will of pharmaceutical manufacturers as well.

This mainly happens because a layman who is suffering from a severe ailment is generally incapable of figuring out that these medicines are counterfeited. They will have either diminished defects or will cause them some other terrible health problems. They think that the drugs from the company are incapable of curing the ailments and also get a reason to express distrust in the healthcare system including the hospitals and doctors prescribing the medications. Even doctors are facing the challenge of credibility because they tend to prescribe quality, suitable medicines, but patients blame them for the wrong prescription as the problem of drug counterfeiting victimizes them.

The problem with the pharmaceutical manufacturing business

The counterfeiting directly results in a loss of credibility and a substantial drastic decrease in the reputation of the company in the market. It is merely because patients consuming those medicines are not benefited from them on merit. They think that the company is incapable of producing quality medicines. It is a problem for all stakeholders of the healthcare and life science industry that is far from the general awareness of the common man but suffered by all.

Supply chain management solution: Blockchain-based decentralized applications for healthcare and life sciences

Why are Blockchains capable of fighting drug counterfeiting?

Blockchain is a primary example of an immutable, highly transparent, and trustworthy distributed ledger technology. In simple words, every transaction can be documented as a permanent record of operation that is virtually impossible to be altered, forged, or misrepresented. Blockchains in the healthcare and life science industry offer highly efficient supply chain management solutions. These solutions are far from the risk of being compromised by any person or third party with malicious intentions of counterfeiting drugs. Blockchains allow healthcare industry businesses to set up nodes at different places to help the industry overcome geographical and temporal challenges all across the globe.

All businesses can leverage 100% credible anonymous trust among third parties on a decentralized consensus with blockchain-based supply chain management solutions for healthcare and life sciences.

How does it work?

Blockchains are capable of hosting a multi-node supply chain management system that involves all the primary and secondary stakeholders of the healthcare industry. The stakeholders include the raw material supplier for medicine manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturers, third-party logistics, distributors, retailers, and doctors. Decentralized Applications for Healthcare and Life Science Industry will help each of these stakeholders to record transactions of medicines or related goods. While others can coherently approve these transactions after verification.

These transactions are completely secured and help parties build much trust in operations and help them maintain transparency as the raw materials and manufactured drugs are passed on from the manufacturer to the logistics company and then in the distribution and sales channel. The digitally documented passage of drugs with different stakeholders as milestones will keep it highly transparent in the digitally recorded journey of drugs. It involves varying stakeholders as milestones who will keep it highly transparent. Moreover, it will be much easier for all the stakeholders in the supply chain to ensure that all the drugs that have been manufactured reach the patients without any slack or introduction of counterfeit drugs.

Problems unsolved after Blockchains in Healthcare & Life sciences

One of the primary concerns of the healthcare and life science industry is the fault tolerance ability of blockchains in case of potential errors. As the sector readily moves in towards the adoption of blockchains, the capability of blockchains at handling fraudulent transactions and the safety of original, authenticated data is still a mystery. One doesn’t know if blockchains can turn corrupt due to bugs in the functional code or if there may be a horrendous loss of critical data which is really difficult or even impossible to be procured again.

The futuristic approach for Blockchain in Healthcare and Life Science Industry would help you understand that as Decentralized Applications in Healthcare & Life Sciences increase to the due stature of fame, the number of private ledgers is bound to arise. In that case, companies in business ecosystems will try to keep their information and operational data private to protect their market share and profits. In such a scenario, it will be challenging to maintain interoperability across private and public blockchains for a more extensive spread use.

Conclusion

Drug counterfeiting is a significant problem in making companies lose profits in the range of $75-$200 every year. Apart from the monetary loss, direct damage to their reputation and brand will is undoubtedly unhealthy for a growing business. Technology has an answer to some of the front-facing problems in the healthcare and life sciences industry. The maturity and stability curve of sustainable technology solutions can be fast-tracked with the help of a leading Blockchain Development Company. It will surely be like an investment for stellar growth in the dimension of technology and a sustainable business process that grows with scalability and interoperability.