The existing supply chain for the pharmaceutical
industry is obsolete and lacks clear visibility over the entire
system. Moreover, the circulation of counterfeit drugs in the
market has increased over the years. According to the WHO
report, around 10.5% of the medicinal drugs in lower / middle
income countries are fake and such drugs may pose serious
threats to public health, sometimes leading to death. Keeping
these threats in mind, in this paper, we propose a blockchainbased model to track the movement of drugs from the industry to
the patient and to minimize the chances of a drug being
counterfeit. The reasons for using blockchain technology in our
work include its immutability property and easy tracking of an
entity in the blockchain. Through this proposed model, the
manufacturer would be able to upload the details corresponding
to a drug, after which it will be sent for approval to the
Government. Thereafter, hospitals and pharmacies, based upon
their requirements, can request the approved drugs. In the
future, if a patient wants some medication, then he or she has to
request it on the blockchain network. The request will be sent to
the nearest hospital/pharmacy and thereafter, the patient can
collect the medication. To implement this model, we have used
Hyperledger fabric due to the presence of many autoimplemented features in it. Our implementation of the proposed
blockchain based model highlights that the model can
successfully detect any drug being counterfeit. This will be
beneficial for the users getting affected with counterfeit drugs.
Moreover, with the proposed model, we can also track the
movement of the drug beginning from the manufacturer right up
to the patient consuming that drug.