Securing Pharmaceutical Supply Chain using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

The production and distribution of counterfeit drugs is an urgent and increasingly critical worldwide issue, especially in pandemics. The imperfect supply chain system in the pharmaceutical industry is one of the reasons for drug counterfeiting. Drugs ownership changes from manufacturers to wholesaler, distributor, and then pharmacist before it reaches the customer thus making it difficult to keep track of it. In this paper, we have compared the existing proposed architectures of blockchain and IoT based supply chain management systems. The system implemented using hyper ledger fabric ensures sharing, storing, transparency, and traceability of data in each link of the supply chain. On the other hand, Ethereum architecture utilized the features of smart contracts to manage the interactions between sender and receiver. Finally, the study mainly focuses on increasing the safety of pharmaceutical products and reducing the manual operation of the supply chain with the most efficient architecture.