A Blockchain and Machine Learning-Based Drug Supply Chain Management and Recommendation System for Smart Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

From the last decade, pharmaceutical companies are facing difficulties in tracking their products during the supply chain process, allowing the counterfeiters to add their fake medicines into the market. Counterfeit drugs are analyzed as a very big challenge for the pharmaceutical industry worldwide. As indicated by the statistics, yearly business loss of around $200 billion is reported by US pharmaceutical companies due to these counterfeit drugs. These drugs may not help the patients to recover the disease but have many other dangerous side effects. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) survey report, in under-developed countries every 10th drug use by the consumers is counterfeit and has low quality. Hence, a system that can trace and track drug delivery at every phase is needed to solve the counterfeiting problem. The blockchain has the full potential to handle and track the supply chain process very efficiently. In this paper, we have proposed and implemented a novel blockchain and machine learning-based drug supply chain management and recommendation system (DSCMR). Our proposed system consists of two main modules: blockchain-based drug supply chain management and machine learning-based drug recommendation system for consumers. In the first module, the drug supply chain management system is deployed using Hyperledger fabrics which is capable of continuously monitor and track the drug delivery process in the smart pharmaceutical industry. On the other hand, the N-gram, LightGBM models are used in the machine learning module to recommend the top-rated or best medicines to the customers of the pharmaceutical industry. These models have trained on well known publicly available drug reviews dataset provided by the UCI: an open-source machine learning repository. Moreover, the machine learning module is integrated with this blockchain system with the help of the REST API. Finally, we also perform several tests to check the efficiency and usability of our proposed system.

A Novel Blockchain-Based Integrity and Reliable Veterinary Clinic Information Management System Using Predictive Analytics for Provisioning of Quality Health Services

“…The proposed blockchain-based RIVIMS is a lightweight platform because the client application communicates with blockchain systems through RESTful API to explore the significant services of blockchain technology. Other existing models, such as MediLedger [28], and DSCMR [30] are also developed based on the permissioned chain of the network. However, these systems are used to store drug supply records in a secured and transparent ledger.…”

“…However, these systems are used to store drug supply records in a secured and transparent ledger. Moreover, all these existing studies, such as MediLedger [28], DSCMR [30], CAS [33], FHIRChain [36], and models presented in [37], [38] are developed based on permissioned chain of the network to facilitate the healthcare industry related to human beings. Whereas, our proposed work is very first attempt to uses permissioned chain of the network to facilitate veterinary clinic management system in order to store and share veterinary clinic data between veterinary doctors, patients, and other veterinary professionals securely and transparently.…”

“…In [39], the authors used a permissioned chain of the network to allow only authenticated healthcare professionals to share EMR data of patients. In [29], [30], the authors proposed a blockchain-based drug supply management for secure and authentic drug supply to improve healthcare services. F. Jamil et al [10] suggested a blockchainbased platform to monitor patient vital signs using different healthcare devices equipped with patients.…”

Review of machine learning algorithms' application in pharmaceutical technology

“…LightGBM, coupled with natural language processing (NLP) and blockchain technology, was also used to develop a management and recommendation system for the drug supply chain (42).…”

Smart Contract Centric Inference Engine For Intelligent Electric Vehicle Transportation System

“…Blockchain technology is developing rapidly, and practical applications have begun in many fields such as logistics [6], medical [7], and food safety [8]. It is foreseeable that more and more industries will apply them in the future.…”