US Food and Drug Administration + four giants deploy blockchain, blockchain penetrates into medical field

On June 13th, a news sparked the attention of many blockchain practitioners and pharmaceutical industry practitioners: The US Food and Drug Administration and four giant companies used blockchain to optimize the pharmaceutical supply chain. Shu Ge talked today, how can the blockchain optimize the drug supply chain?

News report

Let's take a look at the screenshot of this news report:

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and IBM, Wal-Mart, KPMG, and Merck have partnered to launch a blockchain system to track the distribution of prescription drugs and vaccines. Why does the US Food and Drug Administration want to work with several of their companies? Because the roles of these four companies are special:

• IBM: The intruder of the earliest large-scale enterprise in the blockchain industry IBM invested heavily in the development of the blockchain as early as 2014. In 2015, IBM announced support for the Open Ledger Project open book project established by the Linux Foundation, namely The so-called "super account book." In 2016, IBM launched blockchain service platform, “shadow chain” and many other blockchain projects. In 2018, IBM has 1,600 employees working on the blockchain, investing more than 160 million US dollars, with various application scenarios such as food safety, global trade supply chain, financial industry, advertising publishing, advertising department, insurance industry, and Internet of Things. Blockchain.

• Wal-Mart: The world's largest retail company, a frequent visitor to the world's top 500 champions, with 8,500 stores.
• KPMG: KPMG, an audit, tax and advisory service company in 156 countries around the world.
• Merck: Founded in 1668, it has a 350-year history and is the world's oldest pharmaceutical company.

Through the analysis of the main business of these four companies, we can see that IBM is the technology provider of this blockchain platform. Wal-Mart is mainly the sales and distribution of drugs, and belongs to the users of this blockchain platform; and KPMG It is the auditor of this platform and may also provide some audit tax support for the blockchain platform for this drug distribution. Merk and other drug providers are users of the drug blockchain platform, and their products use the drug blockchain traceability platform.

Solution guess

1. Vaccine event review

When it comes to medicines and vaccines, we first thought of the problem vaccine event in 2017. Here is a screenshot of the event on Baidu Encyclopedia:

2. Solution analysis

In fact, the blockchain solution of the medical system is divided into at least the following six aspects:

• Drug traceability
• Medical data
• medical insurance
• Gene data
• Claims and bills
• Drug pricing

What we are talking about today is the “drug (vaccine) traceability” program, which has the common features of “product traceability” and the unique requirements of drugs (vaccines). The common requirements for traceability of goods are reflected in:

• It is necessary to control the whole process of production, processing, transportation, circulation and retail.
• The single item or batch of goods is managed by numerical numbering.

The uniqueness of the traceability of drugs (vaccines) is reflected in:

• Each prescription drug (vaccine) has a unique number that ultimately corresponds to a unique user.
• More detailed information on commodity records, such as information on origin, factory processing records, inspection reports, expiration dates, etc., is required.
• Transportation, storage, handling, handling, packaging, distribution processing, distribution, and more detailed information are also required.

Through the alliance chain, the entire prescription drug (vaccine) production enterprise, circulation enterprise, retail enterprise, and use enterprise (the epidemic prevention station) are all provided with corresponding data for the blockchain platform by means of interfaces, and any drug and vaccine You can query the relevant related circulation by scanning the QR code.

Some less important related data can be packaged for saving, and the data is hashed to write its hash value into the blockchain to reduce the space on the chain occupying the blockchain.

The schematic diagram of the drug blockchain platform is as follows:

Summary: US Food and Drug Administration and the four giants: Blockchain platform provides IBM, the world's largest retail company Wal-Mart, global audit services company KPMG, the world's oldest pharmaceutical company Merck, building blockchains for prescription drugs and vaccines The service platform, which represents the blockchain, has gradually separated from the theoretical research stage and entered the commercial application stage. With the vigorous promotion of various industries and governments, the application of blockchain in various industries will appear in the next few years. .

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