American pharma behemoth Merck has filed for a
US patent for a blockchain-based system, which stores the
location coordinates of objects and tracks them. For this reason,
leading data and analytics company GlobalData believes
that blockchain technology will prove an invaluable tool for
confronting the rise of counterfeit drugs and the first
applications of blockchain in healthcare will emerge in the
supply chain.
Merck began to explore the applications of blockchain
in 2016, when Associate Director of Product Management and
Applied Technology at the pharmaceutical giant, Nishan
Kulatilaka, speculated that after financial services ‘healthcare
could potentially be the second-biggest industry to adopt
blockchain technology’. The company claims that its
blockchain-based system ensures that records are essentially
immutable, and when employed in a supply chain, restricts the
opportunity for fraudulent activities.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development’s (OECD) 2015 report highlighted the drastic need for
improvements in supply chain security and accountability.
According to it, counterfeit goods accounted for 2.5% of the
global pharmaceutical trade in 2013 and global pharmaceutical
sales reached $1.1 trillion in 2015. The OECD deduced that the
counterfeit pharmaceutical industry is worth in the region of
$200bn annually, which is only marginally less than the $246bn
illicit drug trade.
Spencer Shaw, Healthcare Analyst
at GlobalData,
says: “Beyond its potential use within supply chain security,
blockchain is anticipated to provide a secure and convenient
mechanism of data transfer between patients and healthcare
providers.”
Recently, US retail giant Walmart was awarded a
patent for a blockchain-based system for the storage of medical
records retrieved from wearable healthcare devices. The system is
said to allow medical professionals to access medical data from
patients who are unable to communicate.
Shaw concludes: “Blockchain-based systems will begin
to materialize in the healthcare industry in 2018. The primary
obstacles to their implementation for data sharing within the
healthcare industry are regulations concerning medical data and
the prohibitive cost of setting up a common distributed network.
For this reason, although in the long term blockchain will
revolutionize many aspects of healthcare on the patient level,
the first applications of blockchain in healthcare will emerge in
the supply chain, which is less resistant to
change.”
