3 Areas Blockchain Impacts the Life Sciences Ecosystem

Blockchain technology is growing at a disruptive rate and is impacting almost all industries, including life science.

Apac CIOOutlook | Thursday, February 20, 2020

Blockchain technology is growing at a disruptive rate and is impacting almost all industries, including life science. Let's look at the three broad areas where blockchain can be adopted and its impacts on various sectors of life science

FREMONT, CA: With a real-time list of electronic records, where each block contains a timestamp and information about the previous unit, blockchain is emerging as the distributed ledger technology. This technology is growing at a disruptive rate and is impacting almost all industries, including life science. Blockchain is resistant to the modification of data or its provenance. It hence has the potential to enhance cross-industry partnerships, interoperability, integrity, and trust built on consensus, tracing, tracking of tangible and intangible entities in many services in the field of life sciences.

The deployment of blockchain in the biopharmaceutical, healthcare, and medical technology sector need to overcome for broader adoption, suggests PreScouter in a recent report. The report also enlists the emerging use cases of blockchain, their real-world large-scale deployments, and classifies the early adopters of blockchain across the biotech, pharma, and healthcare industries. Let's look at the three broad areas where blockchain can be adopted and its impacts on those sectors.

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Clinical Trials Management

The clinical trial goes through a complicated process integrated into the design, implementation, and management. Blockchain technology has the power to impact the clinical trial management and its various stakeholders including patients/study subjects, study sponsors, drug/medical device providers, clinical investigators, healthcare professionals, and different government regulatory bodies. The clinical data pertaining to these stakeholders must remain private and secure, and the entire process must be transparent with protocols strictly adhered to. Blockchain allows immutability, scalability, and traceability of all records and data access only to an agreeable level. Blockchain also helps to maintain trial protocols, patient consent, track patient samples and ensures secure communication between trial sites.

Drug Development and Supply Chain Management

Blockchain can be very effective for ensuring integrity in the areas of drug manufacturing and supply chain management. The two key areas that are under the purview of authorities are provenance and tracking of compounds. Blockchain facilitates immutable batch records of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in the manufacturing process and makes reporting systems easy for adverse events. Blockchain overcomes the current method of supply chain tracking that is fragmented due to data silos and is keeping the comprehensive track records, identifying, and tracing the prescription medicines and vaccines distributed throughout the country.

Patient-Centric Usage

Blockchain has a potential impact on the activities that surround a patient, which are termed as patient-centric usage. There are various use cases of blockchain, which includes the implementation of "smart contracts" for patient consent. Other uses are ownership management of health data, prescription medicine management, data security for medical/wearable technology as well as deployment in personalized medicine, patient claims, and billings management, and patient record management across siloed healthcare data landscapes. A number of early collaborations that are underway to implement blockchain have achieved the most traction in patient-centric usage.

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