Blockchain: Broccoli & Babies

  • Blockchain busts beyond Bitcoin to Broccoli, (supply chain)
  • Medical Privacy and Security
  • Pharma
  • In Vitro, Fertility
Getty / Forbes Produce Photo

Blockchain and Broccoli

Specific measures like these hope to avoid problems of tainted produce, product recalls and resulting sickness…

Excerpt below:

In September, retail giant Walmart announced that it would begin requiring its suppliers to implement the system to track bags of spinach and heads of lettuce.

But on Monday, IBM announced that its solution-as-a-service cloud platform is now available to all players in the food supply chain, a move that will likely drive unprecedented visibility and veracity into the sourcing and certification of fresh produce and proteins.

Included in the first cohort of adopters are Carrefour – the French retailer which boasts 12,000 stores across 33 countries, cooperatives Topco Associates and Wakefern – which combine to represent more than 15,000 stores globally – and suppliers BeefChain, Smithfield and Dennick Fruit Source.

Other participants include multinational companies Nestle, Kroger, Tyson Foods, Kroger and Unilever.

Medical Privacy and Security

Blockchain potential and growth in healthcare

As stated in the Deloitte report, “Blockchain is a versatile technology that can record financial transactions, store medical records, or even track the flow of goods, information, and payments through a supply chain. Ultimately, it’s more of a business model enabler, than a technology.”

While blockchain is not the ‘be all end all,’ there are numerous challenge areas in the healthcare industry that can be mitigated with blockchain technology, including data security, interoperability, and data accessibility. For instance, data breaches are particularly costly for healthcare in comparison to other industries, with costs in healthcare 2.5 times greater than the global average across industries.

Pharma Safety and Time to Market

Innoplexus.com:

Blockchain 

…[may] enable the development of complete end-to-end supply chain management for every company and product. By allowing multiple stakeholders to participate in distributing the network, it creates an incredibly secure database, without the patchwork configuration of previous supply chain technologies.

 

Manufacturing supply chain – BC logistics

One of the key issues of pharmaceutical manufacturing supply chains is … virtually no visibility into end-consumer sales for manufacturers. Some of the problems that arise from this complex situation could be avoided easily with blockchain by providing real-time access to data and visibility across the entire pharmaceutical supply chain, [tracking] from the ingredient supplier’s product codes to the pharmacies dispensing prescriptions to patients.

Drug safety – how drugs are manufactured
 
…. The traceability of active pharmaceutical ingredients during actual manufacture is a difficult process, so detecting drugs that do not contain the intended active ingredients can ultimately lead to end-consumer patient harm or even death.
 
The number of deaths related to these issues has been increasing in recent years. Blockchain’s advanced features make it capable of providing a basis for complete traceability of drugs, from manufacturer to end consumer, and the ability to identify exactly where the supply chain breaks down during an issue.
 

In Vitro, Fertility Anonymity

BTCNN

15,000 Egg Donors’ Profiles Stored on Blockchain For Data Security – BTCNN

While commenting on the security feature of the distributed ledger technology, the company outlined that pieces of data that link the identity of the donor are encrypted, fragmented, and split in different locations. As such, even if ALTR’s dashboard is hacked, an attacker will be unable to access such files. The only data that is visible to the public are the features of the donor such as eye color, height, …

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