1.8 ml of sodium chloride is added to a bottle of Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine concentrate ready for administration at Guy’s Hospital at the start of the largest immunization program ever in UK history on 8 December 2020 in London, United Kingdom.
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LONDON – Two hospitals in the UK are actively using blockchain technology to maintain the temperature of coronavirus vaccines before administering them 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 the likes of Google and IBM.
Although originally created as the digital ledger that supports bitcoin, blockchain has since been adapted by various industries for applications outside the realm of finance. IBM and Walmart, for example, used blockchain to track food supply chains and identify potential pollutants.
Tom Screen, technical director of Everyware, told CNBC that his sensors will monitor the temperature of refrigerators that store vaccines. It then sends the data to its own cloud platform where it is encrypted and then transferred to Hedera’s blockchain network.
The point of this operation is to keep a digital record of temperature-sensitive vaccines, such as those developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. Theoretically, the hospitals would be able to detect irregularities in the storage of the vaccines before they are administered to patients.
Pfizer’s vaccine needs to be stored at sub-zero temperatures (-70 degrees Celsius), and can only last up to two to eight degrees Celsius conditions for up to five days, creating major barriers to logistics for distribution.
However, the vaccines developed by Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca can be stored at temperatures that are within the range of the average refrigerator. for longer.
Blockchain saw a lot of hype in 2017 as the value of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin skyrocketed. This has led to several projects of large companies, including IBM and Walmart, as well as governments, involved in the promise to replace various old paper-based processes for record keeping.
Today, it seems like the noise around blockchain is dead, with rare trials and products based on the technology being announced by big business.
Asked why blockchain is needed rather than a regular database, Everyware’s Screen said that “data kept in a private database can be verified against the state of data recorded on the public ledger.”
“The benefits of an immutable ledger to verify the validity of data as close to the source as possible have a positive effect on the accuracy of downstream analyzes, where any error in the source data in output datasets can be magnified,” he said. said.
Everyware competed in an open tender process involving other bidders to provide their services to the South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust, Screen said.