Chapter 12 - Drug traceability using blockchain

Abstract

For many years, pharmaceutical organizations have battled to trace products across the supply chain. This shortcoming has made it easier for counterfeiters to introduce counterfeit pharmaceuticals onto the market. To solve the challenge, a new method for tracking and tracing medications is needed. Researchers believe blockchain can provide the technological underpinning for such a system because it can track legal pharmaceuticals and assist prevent the circulation of counterfeit ones. Counterfeited pharmaceuticals and unapproved medicines are dangerous and cause harm to patient life, owing to several causes such as its ineffectiveness, contamination, and inappropriate dose. The major challenge in handling this is the identification of the counterfeited product due to their similarity to the authentic drugs. Counterfeiting of drugs has become high-volume, high-profit business to the counterfeiters in the 21st century. Blockchain is an electronic cryptographic ledger that has a decentralized network model, here the information is not stored in one database, but the information is distributed and synchronized throughout the supply chain. Since counterfeiting of drugs is increasing globally, pharmaceutical companies are adapting blockchain technology to prevent counterfeiting. The supply of medicines is from manufactures to wholesalers, distributors, and pharmacy stores before it is purchased by customers; the counterfeiters come in between this supply chain and thus fake medicines get supplied and distributed. In this chapter, we are introducing blockchain-based solution “Drug-chain” to improve on the end the end transparency of the drug in supply chain using quick response (QR) code. The authentication of the stakeholders using private and public key is proposed to avoid the misuse of QR code in drug counterfeit. The proposed solution resolves the issues of drug supply chain by bringing the transparency, traceability, security, and authenticity of the data.