1.8ml of sodium chloride is added to a vial 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, UK United.
Victoria Jones – Pool | Getty Images
LONDON – Two hospitals in the UK are actively using blockchain technology to help maintain the temperature of coronavirus vaccines before administering them to patients.
The National Health Service facilities in South Warwickshire, England, are using technology developed by the British company Everyware and the American organization Hedera Hashgraph. Everyware uses sensors to monitor equipment in real time, while Hedera is a blockchain consortium supported by companies like Google and IBM.
Although originally created as the digital ledger that supports bitcoin, blockchain has been adapted by various sectors for applications outside the realm of finance. IBM and Walmart, for example, used blockchain to track food supply chains and identify potential contamination.
Tom Screen, Everyware’s technical director, told CNBC that his sensors would monitor the temperature of refrigerators that store vaccines. It then transmits the data to its own cloud platform, where it is encrypted and then passed on to Hedera’s blockchain network.
The purpose of this operation is to maintain a tamper-proof digital record of temperature-sensitive vaccines, such as those developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. In theory, hospitals would be able to detect any irregularities in the storage of vaccines before applying them to patients.
The Pfizer vaccine must be stored at temperatures below zero (-70 degrees Celsius), and can only last in conditions of two to eight degrees Celsius for up to five days, creating major obstacles for distribution logistics.
The vaccines developed by Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca, however, can be stored at temperatures that are within reach of a common household refrigerator. longer.
Blockchain saw a lot of enthusiasm in 2017, when the value of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin soared. This has led to several projects by large companies, including IBM and Walmart, as well as governments, drawn by the promise to replace several old paper-based record-keeping processes.
Today, the buzz around blockchain seems to have subsided, with almost no testing and technology-based products being advertised by large corporations.
Asked why blockchain was needed instead of a regular database, Everyware’s Screen said that “data kept in a private database can be checked against the state of the data recorded in the public ledger.”
“The benefits of an immutable ledger for checking data validity as close as possible to the source have a positive effect on the accuracy of downstream analysis, where any errors in the source data would be magnified in the output data sets,” he said.
Everyware competed in an open bidding process involving other bidders to provide its services to the South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust, Screen said.