Blockchain-Based Pharmaceutical Supply Chain: A Literature Review

Recently, blockchain technology was introduced to the public in order to provide a secure environment that is immutable, consensus-based and transparent in the finance technology world. However, there have been many efforts to apply blockchain to other fields where trust and transparency are a requirement. The ability to reliably share pharmaceutical information between various stakeholders is essential. The use of blockchain technology adds traceability and visibility to supply chains such as pharmaceuticals to provide all the information from end to end. Currently, the data is stored and managed by large manufacturers and pharmacy retailers using their own centralized systems. Several existing approaches and methods that allow pharmaceutical information to be stored and shared between the healthcare provider and other stakeholders in a centralized manner have been discussed in the literature. Due to the lack of comprehensive literature review studies that focus on pharmaceutical supply chain using blockchain technology, thus this paper highlights and addresses this gap. This paper reviews several studies which have applied blockchain technology in pharmaceutical supply chains. This paper overviews the knowledge on blockchain technology, discusses and explores the most recent and relevant studies that adopt blockchain technology in the field of pharmaceutical supply chains, describes the challenges associated with blockchain technology, and presents some ideas for future work.