Blockchain for a while now has been touted as the technology of the future. With its features of assured trust, accountability and decentralization, it would be a dream for any enterprise to put it to use. One such industry that has seen value in the technology and relegated it to use to tackle unique challenges to the sector is healthcare and pharma.
In the Blockchain Summit organized by IAMAI, multiple stakeholders—from innovators to enterprise leaders—discussed the implications of blockchain on healthcare and pharma, the challenges associated with the compliance and adoption and the value associated with the technology for multiple stakeholders. The discussion was especially enlightening as blockchain has been a prime tech providing spine for vaccine distribution in the country.
Traceability is an advantage
One thing that differentiates the western ecosystem is the mechanism of serializing and aggregating are already present that provides complete linkage of the drug, said Sreenivas Rao, Global Head of Supply Chain, SunPharma. It is also then easy to trace and track the movement across the chain and also the recall is easy by tracing specific stakeholders like chemists, distributors, etc.
“I am looking forward to the startup companies to enlighten the pharma industry on blockchain. It will benefit every single person. There is a lot of scope to come in pharma,” Rao said.
Where are the roadblocks?
Akash Takyar, Co-founder, LeewayHertz, provides consultancy to startups and helped build nearly 30 blockchain products. He classified the challenges associated with blockchain, adoption and roll out into three buckets: Compliance, technical maturity and security.
“Compliance can be dealt with as long as there is clarity on how identity is playing a role in any application in blockchain and how on chain storage is done. This is one roadblock for making it mainstream,” Takyar said.
Also, deep technical maturity needs to happen. You may have issues like migration of data from one version of truth to another version of better truth. “The challenge to solve here would be how to bring more stakeholders into the system and ensure provisioning and participation, and mechanism for error correction,” Takyar said.
Also, another roadblock would be security. Takyar said that a solution is never fully on chain and is hybrid in nature. That is an important aspect to consider and solve for cybersecurity.
Another roadblock that RamKrishna V, Co-founder, AsliMedicine.com & Zoreum Labs stated is the market readiness. “We built a complete end-to-end solution but the market isn’t ready for it,” he said.
Considering ethics and privacy
Sid Chakravarthy, Founder, StaTwig has received a lot of attention over the last few weeks for being associated with the Covid vaccine distribution platform through the blockchain solution. The company started four years ago and concentrated on a niche segment of vaccine supply chain as there were challenges associated with it.
“We focused on vaccines for two reasons: Noticed Hyderabad for being a hub for vaccine manufacturing and got on board UNICEF, one of the largest distributors of vaccines. And also got validation, support and funding to deploy solution on large scale supply chain,” said Chakravarthy.
He also said the company focused on commercial and public distribution. This is where the government is procurer of vaccines and the process goes through a multi-tier distribution of vaccines. “While designing we ensured privacy, security into our solution. We were also dealing with multiple largescale enterprises which pan across multiple countries. They have existing securities system which you have to integrate with. We had to spend effort on developing very good access control mechanisms. Through it we had to build to cater to different levels in a company and monitor and restrict who has access to what and how does the technology support,” he said.
He said these were possible as the focus never wavered from the niche segment. The solution isn’t easily replicable and there is work going on in opensource projects in that segment.
Discussion around privacy intensifies
Sameer K, Business Transformation Consultant, IBM took the discussion a step ahead and talked about: How does one provide a trusted credential of being vaccinated and not being at risk of infecting others. Other side we have vaccine authorities providing credentials. Another stakeholder are companies, hotels, etc. verifying those credentials. An individual, understandably, wants to have complete control over those credentials without compromising privacy.
Where blockchain is useful is setting up the ecosystem where issuers and verifiers are on the same network. It provides a trusted mechanism of providing a zero-proof knowledge where you don’t share any personal data with verifier. All the three parties—individuals, issuers, verifiers are looking for trust.
Deriving value out of data
Chakravarthy pointed out that blockchain did see a steady adoption even before pandemic. In pharma companies there is definite visibility in extended supply chain, where the products are heading and getting distributed, how long they stay in the warehouses. That information is useful to generate actionable insights, to ensure quality and safety.
Covid19 has definitely accelerated some of the adoption. New technologies would have taken a long time for mainstream adoption but with Covid19, a lot of decisions are being made quickly.