Healthcare Company Uses Blockchain Technology To Fight Counterfeit Medicines

A Singaporean healthcare company has created a blockchain-based application to prevent the consumption of counterfeit medicine and vaccine.

What happened: According to a BeInCrypto report, Zuellig Pharma recently launched an anti-counterfeit application called eZTracker for the iOS and Android platforms. The app confirms the authenticity of medicines and vaccines using a QR code scanner.

eZTracker features a simple user interface and also tracks the expiration dates and storing temperature of medicines. This could prevent “expired or improperly stored” Covid-19 vaccines from being used.

“For products registered with eZTracker and depending on the needs of our pharma principals, patients can scan the 2D data matrix on the product packaging to verify key product information like expiry date, temperature, and provenance through its app powered by blockchain,”  said Daniel Laverick, Vice President and Head of Digital and Data solutions at the company.

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The United Nations Drugs and Crimes office reports that each year $520 million to $2.6 billion are spent on counterfeit medicines in Southeast Asia. Additionally, Zuellig Pharma says investigating the legitimacy of medical products can be time-consuming, and the related data can be processed more quickly with eZTracker.

On January 12, a private clinic in Hong Kong injected patients with 36 expired vaccines, which resulted in two people reporting gastrointestinal pain. This is only one of the cases of counterfeit medicine resulting in harm to patients that eZTracker has been created to help prevent.

Photo: Courtesy of IBM Research on Flickr