Counterfeit drugs prevention using block chain techniques

Abstract

The production and distribution of counterfeit drugs is an urgent and increasingly critical worldwide issue, especially in developing countries. The pharmaceutical counterfeiting’s market price has hit over billions of dollars yearly. The flawed supply chain system in the pharmaceutical industry is one of the main reasons for drug imitations. Before meeting the clients, the ownership of the medicaments shifts from suppliers to wholesalers. Knowledge is not shared between processes in modern supply chain systems; manufacturers don’t even have any input at what occurs to their goods, just that the drug administration has no summary of the system; reminder programs are complex and inefficient and patients can not follow up. This project describes how in the pharmaceutical supply chains we use block chain technologies to provide the monitoring and protection of the drug supplier. The presented method will also be used by the pharmaceutical industry to track the medication from the particular time it is manufactured to the patient. The result of each drug used is recorded for future use in the database. An accepted block chain is used for storing transactions and only trusted parties can enter the network and move data in the block chain.