Najib Rehman, Data Strategy Lead, at FarmaTrust and Raja Sharif, CEO and Founder of FarmaTrust join us in this exciting podcast on how they use AI and blockchain technology in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry to help resolve some of its problems.

 
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is essentially a database that is distributed for all relevant parties to have access and visibility. Where it differs from traditional databases is that it doesn’t have a sole controller. With blockchain if all the parties have an agreement, a consensus around what the distributed dataset looks liken, then it’s very difficult to game the system. Blockchain makes it easier to identify the bad actors.

 
Fraud & challenges in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry

The World Health Organisation estimates that up to 700,000 people die every year due to complications caused by counterfeit Tuberculosis and Malaria vaccines. PWC estimates that counterfeit pharmaceutical is a $200bn annual business. This is quite a significant percentage of the $1.2 trillion pharmaceuticals global trade.

In the UK alone, the NHS is dealing with large amounts of waste within various hospital institutions such as how inventory is managed, how it’s being leveraged and used within each hospital by healthcare professionals or not being used. Due to the very nature of healthcare, hospitals can't afford not to have something on the shelf to treat a patient, as the consequences could be catastrophic for the patient. So, there is a large amount of excess stock that’s often floating and often sadly not used to ensure that patient safety and patient lives are the priority.

 

The World Health Organisation estimates that more than 50% of drugs sold online in the West is fake. In Europe the Falsified Medicines Directive and in the US the Drugs Supply Chain Security Act are both trying to address this challenge by stipulating that pharmaceutical companies need to have individual serialisation and digitisation of the packs of medicine. So, all packs in developed markets now have to have an individual identity that therefore makes the use of distributed ledger technology quite suitable for this challenge

Combination of AI and machine learning can help identify patterns to help healthcare professionals ensure that patients are treated but without the waste that we’re seeing today.

 
Data standards in healthcare
GS1 is a global data standard that is used across industries including in healthcare. It is a standard that is used for products for tracking and identification. These standards aren’t always adhered to. Companies and entities will create their own identifiers for a product which then conflicts. How to address this problem is an important question that needs to be addressed by companies,