Initial Situation

Interviews with pharmacies and Webinars by industry partners highlighted that the drug sharing has much potential in being optimized. Specifically, the exchange of medicines among pharmacies or other stakeholders is not fully coordinated and automated.

The Corona pandemic exposed issues in quality and quantity of material such as masks. Various materials of reduced quality have come into circulation during this period due to insufficient stocks and control mechanisms. Another problem is the insufficient communication between pharmacists and other stakeholders. For example, there is no visible stock of existing drugs in the entire circulation. A pharmacy can therefore not exactly know what other pharmacies have in their stock. This leads to inefficiencies in the exchange of medicines directly between pharmacies and various stakeholders such as patients for example. As a result, shortages occur in situations of increased demand as it is a challenge to track the locations and ownerships of the products.

Goal of the Challenge

We intend to optimize the exchange, shipping and transport of medicines between stakeholders in the healthcare industry using Blockchain technology. The goal is to create a prototype of a Blockchain where the transactions between the stakeholders are visible at all time, productions and orders are automated and security against fraud or counterfeiting is given.

Outcome

The output of these Hackdays is a basic prototype of a Blockchain that comes with its concept plan and description.

Concept:

The ecosystem of a healthcare industry including different process were created and visualized on a Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) concept. This process illustrated some of the most important transactions of such an ecosystem from initial production of the drug to its consumption. Furthermore, the whole concept ensures that all information that occurs after each transaction is stored in the Blockchain. The Blockchain database not only ensures that transaction data cannot be subsequently manipulated, it also opens the way for drug manufacturers and pharmacies to make data analysis to improve their processes, products and services according to the latest demand.

A more detailed description of the concept and its various processes can be found in our repository .

Prototype Blockchain:

A prototype of a Blockchain was created with the use of Python programming language. By implementing various participants (pharma manufacturer), assets (the items such as drugs) and transactions (the various processes such as the order or deliver of drugs) in to the Blockchain, it was possible to automate the generation of transactions and its underlying blocks of the Blockchain. Thereby, Use cases such as fraud detection and information transparency were addressed and implemented in our prototype. Below you will find an output of the Python-file, where the individual stocks of the various stakeholders regarding a specific type of medicine is illustrated. This use case would help the pharma manufacturer to monitor and control the circulation of its product and therefore forecast and future demand.

Next Steps

• This prototype of a Blockchain will further be presented and discussed by the City of Lucerne for further development
• The technology and system behind this Blockchain may not only be applied on drug sharing, but also on other areas such as food waste or recycling
• The increased efficiency and transparency of Blockchain may the right approach for a stakeholder relationship management model

Below you find the slides to our final presentation of the hackdays:

Contact

For further information on this project, please contact the challenge owner: Matthias Albisser.