Traceability and detection of counterfeit medicine supply chain through Blockchain

Abstract

The production and distribution of counterfeit drugs is an urgent and increasingly critical worldwide issue, especially in developing countries.  The market value of pharmaceutical counterfeiting has reached billions of dollars annually.  One of the reasons for drugs counterfeiting is the imperfect supply chain system in pharmaceutical industry.Drugs change ownership from manufacturers to wholesaler, distributer and then pharmacist before it reach the customer.  In current supply chain system, information is not shared  between  systems,  manufacturers  don ?t  know  what  happened  to  their  products,drugs regulatory authority has no visibility of the system, recalls are complicated andcostly, and companies cannot follow-up patients.  In this paper we explain how to useblock-chain technology in pharmaceutical supply chain to add traceability, visibility andsecurity to the drugs supply system.  The proposed system will be used in pharmaceutical  industry  to  track  the  drugs  from  its  manufacturing  until  its  delivery  to  patient.After the usage of a drug,  its effect on patient will be recorded to a database for future statistics.  A permission block-chain will be used for storing transactions and onlytrusted parties will be allowed to join the network and push data to block-chain