LONDON (UK) – Two British hospitals are using blockchain technology to keep an account of the storage and supply of temperature-sensitive COVID-19 vaccines, the companies behind the initiative said on Tuesday. This has been one of the first such initiatives in the world.
Two hospitals, in central England’s Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick, are broadening their use of a distributed ledger, which is an offshoot of blockchain, and it would range from tracking vaccines and chemotherapy drugs to monitoring fridges storing COVID-19 vaccines.
The tech will boost record-keeping and data-sharing across supply chains, said Everyware, which evaluates vaccines and other treatments for Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), and Texas-based ledger Hedera, that are owned by firms such as Alphabet’s Google and IBM, in a statement.
For instance, Pfizer Inc and BioNTech’s shot must be shipped and stored either at ultra-cold temperatures or on dry ice, and can only last at standard fridge temperatures, which go up to five days.
Other vaccines, such as Moderna Inc’s, do not require such cold storage and are therefore easy to be delivered.
Everyware’s Tom Screen said in an interview, “We can absolutely verify the data that we’ve collected from every single device. We make sure that data is accurate at source, and after that point we can verify that it’s never been changed, it’s never been tampered with.”
Firms from finance to commodities have made an investment of millions of dollars to produce blockchain, a digital ledger allowing the secure and real-time recording of data, hoping for radical cost cuts and efficiency gains.
Results have been mixed, though, with few projects achieving the revolutionary impact heralded by proponents.
Everyware’s Screen said while it would be possible to monitor the vaccines without blockchain, manual systems would bring forth discrepancies.
Steve Clarke, electro-bio medical engineering manager at South Warwickshire NHS in a statement, said the system will “allow us to demonstrate our commitment to providing safe patient care”.