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IBM, KPMG, Merck, Walmart team up for drug supply chain blockchain pilot
IBM announced its latest blockchain initiative today. This one is in partnership with KPMG, Merk and Walmart to build a drug supply chain blockchain pilot.
These four companies are coming together to help come up with a solution to track certain drugs as they move through a supply chain. IBM is acting as the technology partner, KPMG brings a deep understanding of the compliance issues, Merk is of course a drug company and Walmart would be a drug distributor through its pharmacies and care clinics.
The idea is to give each drug package a unique identifier that you can track through the supply chain from manufacturer to pharmacy to consumer. Seems simple enough, but the fact is that companies are loathe to share any data with one another. The blockchain would provide an irrefutable record of each transaction as the drug moved along the supply chain, giving authorities and participants an easy audit trail.
The pilot is part of a set of programs being conducted by various stakeholders at the request of the FDA. The end goal is to find solutions to help comply with the U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act. According to the FDA Pilot Program website, "FDA's DSCSA Pilot Project Program is intended to assist drug supply chain stakeholders, including FDA, in developing the electronic, interoperable system that will identify and trace certain prescription drugs as they are distributed within the United States."
Also at Forbes and Motley Fool.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday June 14 2019, @09:40PM
And blockchains (like bow ties and fezzes) are cool!
And it's the big boys doing it. Not the bit player cryptocurrency guys playing the suckers until they can abscond with their cssh.
What I find curious (although not curious enough to read TFA) is how are they going to track via blockchain at the *retail* level?
Drugs are generally delivered to pharmacies in bulk, and then prescriptions are filled from that bulk packaging.
Are they going to create blockchain transactions on a per-pill basis? I find that a little hard to swallow (pun intended -- yes, I know, ouch!).
Using a mechanism like this could work just fine (as could a distributed database with correlated updates) at the level of packages supplied to a pharmacy, but after that, not so much.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr