Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain Applications in Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Provenance to Achieve Traceability, Transparency, and Authenticity

Introduction

Medicine supplies are one of the building blocks of healthcare systems (WHO, 2010). In the present health-conscious society, the satisfactory quality and regulatory compliance of drugs have gained enormous attention globally due to the significant risk of counterfeit and unqualified medicines that could pose to consumer health (Sylim et al., 2018). From manufacturing to consumption, there are multiple partners and intermediaries involved in the pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC). This brings about great traceability challenges in present centralized systems such as single point of failure, data manipulation, interoperability, security, stakeholder agreement, implementation cost, lack of standardization and regulations (Premkumar and C, 2020, Uddin et at., 2021). Operating with legacy information platforms could not assist the collaboration amongst multiple participants of PSC (Vecchione, 2017). It also could not support the tracking and tracing of sources required to ensure quality, regulatory compliance, and drug security.

Internet of things (IoT) and Blockchain technology have been brought to the forefront of global attention in different industries. The application of IoT in supply chain management could support real-time information update and monitoring (Premkumar and C, 2020). The blockchain technology could document everything related to the whole supply chain and allow information sharing across the distribution network in a secure manner (Bocek et al., 2017). Implementation of drug provenance across the whole PSC is essential to strengthen the governance and supervision of the pharma market (Sylim et al., 2018). Hence, the application of IoT and Blockchain in PSC would have a tremendous role in future pharmaceutical domain. The application of IoT and blockchain could help to achieve the target of track and trace capability, authenticity and transparency by improving the collaboration, as well as, information sharing amongst the PSC stakeholders.