A last-mile blockchain application designed to help deliver real medications to real patients.
In 2019, the USFDA issued a call for enterprising stakeholders to help them tackle the problem of counterfeit and suspect medicines. BRUINchain was created to scan 2D barcodes on medications, tracking their path through the pharmacy at the refrigerator level, and even verify the drug’s authenticity with the manufacturer.
Published in the peer review journal Blockchain in Healthcare Today, our study reveals how blockchain would save the US pharmaceutical industry over $180 million each year, along with reducing counterfeits and hidden costs worth billions of dollars.
Features & Capabilities
In 2020, a superteam of healthcare stakeholders joined forces to evaluate the use of verifiable credentials to give pharmacists new tools to interoperate with manufacturers and secure the drug supply chain.
The results of our real-world deployment with the UCLA specialty pharmacy are published in the peer-review journal Blockchain in Healthcare Today, with contributions from supply chain leaders at Genentech, Amgen, and Sanofi.
DSCSA-mandated barcodes serve as the foundational information building block for a common data model
GS1 barcode scanning nearly 100% effective with commercial off-the-shelf iPhone
Drugs can be tracked to the “refrigerator” level within a dispensing pharmacy (not just ownership, but physical custody)
Tracked expiration dates, verified barcodes, inspected for problems and provided paths for exception handling
Tracing and verifying by interoperating with upstream relational database
Automatic removal of double-counts and flagging suspect transactions
Notify colleagues about availability and verification in real-time
Capable of master data management for all drugs and packages (including expiration extensions and recalls)
“From a dispenser’s perspective, the DSCSA checks will be expensive and we want to get value from this process. Even more, we don’t want drugs to pile up while we are waiting on verification, so the verification should be nearly real-time.
BRUINchain successfully met all our DSCSA pilot objectives: from reading real barcodes with a working app, to enabling real pharmacists and real doctors to bring life-saving medicines to the patients that needed them.”
— Dr. Will Chien, inventory purchasing manager, UCLA Health
The Last Mile: DSCSA Solution Through Blockchain Technology
Drug Tracking, Tracing, and Verification at the Last Mile of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain with BRUINchain
The Last Mile: DSCSA Solution Through Blockchain Technology
How LedgerDomain’s Hyperledger Fabric Solution Unlocks Real-Time Inventory Management
BRUINchain is a collaboration of LedgerDomain and UCLA Health. Special thanks as well to our friends at Biogen for their assistance during the pilot.
