Stratis, the C# and .Net blockchain platform today announced its latest partnership with the UK’s fastest growing online pharmacy, UK Meds.
The online pharmacy, which processes between 3,000 to 4,000 orders per day will deploy Stratis’ blockchain technology to improve patient safety, reducing instances of patients ordering multiple prescriptions.
By ensuring each patient’s request for a prescription is logged on a shared and immutable distributed ledger across a group of UK online pharmacies, the program ensures patients can only access prescribed quantities of medication.
Doctors dealing with online consultations and pharmacies preparing medication will have the ability to cross-reference patients using a unique identifier assigned to each individual. Any previous request for medication across all online pharmacies in the program will be easily referenceable using Stratis’ technology, ensuring patients receive correct prescriptions.
“Despite screening our own customers by IP addresses, phone numbers, cookie, and many other factors, there isn’t a cross-industry solution to identify patients attempting to obtain multiple orders of drugs, with opioids being a particular example. Clearly, our entire industry needs to come together to ensure we do everything possible to protect the vulnerable and utilizing Stratis’ technology can help us achieve that. Stratis provides a highly secure blockchain solution that can be shared across the industry to provide a trusted and verifiable record of patient requests for medicine. We are initiating this program, and we have over 10 online pharmacies onboard already. It’s our ambition for this to become the de facto standard across the entire UK industry.”
Smart Contracts
Stratis’ technology will also be used to improve UK Meds’ own supply-chain by deploying Stratis’ Smart Contracts in C#, which is essentially code running on top of the blockchain enabling it to undertake specific tasks, at critical stages.
In combination with track and trace logistics solutions, each shipment of medication will be logged on the blockchain when originally produced by the manufacturer, during points of distribution and again on arrival at UK Meds to certify pharmaceutical shipments are correctly packed, arrive in fine condition and remain securely sealed in the correct quantity.
“This is a great example of blockchain being deployed where its unique qualities will make a real difference. Using traditional IT solutions to solve this issue would require a significant expense and would undoubtedly be administered by a third-party organization. With blockchain, the industry can cooperate on the critical issue of patient safety using a shared version of the truth.”
