1.8ml sodium chloride is added to an ampoule of Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine concentrate, ready for administration at Guy’s Hospital at the start of the largest immunization program in UK history on December 8, 2020 in London, United Kingdom Kingdom.
Victoria Jones – Swimming pool | Getty Images
LONDON – Two hospitals in the UK are actively using blockchain technology to maintain the temperature of coronavirus vaccines before they are administered to patients.
The National Health Service facilities in South Warwickshire, England, use technology developed by the British firm Everyware and the American organization Hedera Hashgraph. Everyware uses sensors to monitor equipment in real time, while Hedera is a blockchain consortium supported by Google and IBM, among others.
Although originally created as the digital ledger that underpins bitcoin, blockchain has since been adapted by various industries for uses outside of the realm of finance. For example, IBM and Walmart have used blockchain to track food supply chains and identify potential contamination.
Tom Screen, technical director at Everyware, told CNBC that its sensors would monitor the temperature of refrigerators containing vaccines. It then sends the data to its own cloud platform where it is encrypted and then passed on to Hedera’s blockchain network.
The goal of this operation is to maintain a tamper-resistant digital registry of temperature-sensitive vaccines, such as those developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. The hospitals could theoretically pick up any irregularities in the storage of the vaccines before giving them to patients.
Pfizer’s vaccine must be stored at freezing temperatures (-70 degrees Celsius), and can last for up to five days at two to eight degrees Celsius, creating major logistics hurdles in its distribution.
However, the vaccines developed by Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca can be stored at temperatures within the range of the average home refrigerator. for longer.
Blockchain experienced a lot of hype in 2017, when the value of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin skyrocketed. It sparked several projects from major corporations, including IBM and Walmart, as well as governments, who were lured by the promise to replace several old paper-based record keeping processes.
Today, the buzz around blockchain seems to have stopped, with hardly any trials and products based on the technology being announced by major companies.
When asked why blockchain was needed instead of a regular database, Everyware’s Screen said that “data in a private database can be verified by the state of the data recorded in the ledger.”
“The benefits of an immutable ledger to verify the validity of data as close to the source as possible has a positive effect on the accuracy of downstream analysis, where any error in the source data would be magnified in the output datasets,” he said.
Everyware entered an open tender involving other bidders to provide its services to the South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust, Screen said.