PharmaLedger, a European Union-centric healthcare blockchain consortium, has announced its first eight use cases.

Representatives of the 29 entities in the consortium achieved what PharmaLedger described as the ‘first major milestone on [a] three-year collaboration journey to deliver a common and widely trusted blockchain-based platform and use case reference implementations for supply chain, clinical trials and health data.’

Among the use cases which are being explored include:

• Supply chain: The use case is linked to trust in medicine, whereby a ‘blockchain-anchored’ eLeaflet will be delivered to a mobile app, website or printer, to assess the veracity and transparency of a product. The eLeaflet “can serve as a foundation for future scalability of functionalities that create value for the patient”, such as recalls, product information updates, known drug interaction issues, and environmentally-safe medicine disposal

• Healthcare data: Blockchain will aim to be used to define common pre-screening criteria to ensure GDPR-compliant patient permission, with dynamic permissioning aiming to ‘strengthen patient data ownership and full control over who, and when, a stakeholder is allowed [to] access health data

• Clinical trials: The use case called ‘eConsent’ will create a digitally enabled, trusted consent process to alleviate paper-based systems, integrating IoT data with advanced analytics

The members of the consortium, which launched at the beginning of this year, include Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline’s research and development arm.

“For blockchain to achieve its potential in helping our society become digitally trustworthy, mass adoption and true horizontal innovation needs to take place,” said Clarisse Dias da Mota, a blockchain business analyst at Novartis who also serves on PharmaLedger’s culture and adoption team. “PharmaLedger contributes to that by proposing and developing both use case-specific solutions and an overarching open source platform.”

In Europe last month, Swiss blockchain provider TIXnGO announced the launch of a secure health certificate mobile delivery offering. The product was a repurposing of the company’s technology for secure ticket distribution in a healthcare use case.

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