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Blockchain is becoming increasingly essential to address the challenges of trust and speed in the life sciences supply chain.

FREMONT, CA: Blockchain entered into public discourse as the distributed ledger technology that functions as the foundation of the digital currency. The financial industry quickly recognized the potential of blockchain, with multiple use cases in financial transactions and services. But for the life sciences industry too, blockchain has the potential to improve cross-industry partnerships, integrity, and trust developed on consensus, interoperability, and tracking of entities in many services and product pipelines. Here are the significant use cases of blockchain set to reshape life sciences.

• Drug Development and Supply Chain Management

In drug manufacturing and supply chain management, blockchain can be beneficial for ensuring integrity. Tracking of compounds is a critical area that is under the purview of authorities such as the FDA, with oversight through the drug supply chain security act. Blockchain can offer immutable batch records of active pharmaceutical ingredients in the manufacturing process and easy reporting systems for adverse occurrences and drug batch recall. The use of blockchain to identify, track, and trace medicines and vaccines distributed throughout the country.

• Clinical Trials Management

Clinical trials include many stakeholders like patients, study subjects, sponsors, medical device providers, clinical investigators, healthcare practitioners like physicians and nurses, and various government regulatory authorities. Clinical trials, therefore, are the perfect match for blockchain technology, which enables for immutability, scalability, and traceability with varied data access permissive levels. A blockchain could assist manage patient consent, keep trial protocols, track patient samples, and make sure that secure communications between trial sites.

• Patient-Centric Usage

The potential impact of blockchain technology on functions that surround a patient, which can be called patient-centric blockchain usage. Blockchain deployment has achieved the most traction in patient-centric usage, as seen by early collaborations that are underway. These use cases are different and include implementation of blockchain for patient consent and ownership management of data, patient record management, prescription medicine management, patient claims and billings management, data security as well as deployment in personalized medicine.

See also: Top Blockchain Technology Companies