IQZ Blockchain Opioid Tracker

Inspiration

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total "economic burden" of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement. Apart from the financial impact, about 50,000 in the United States died in 2019 because of opioid overdose. Opioids here includes prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. This is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare. Opioid prescription is critical for people suffering from chronic diseases but in many cases, it moves from necessity to dependence and this forces the person into addiction. Once addicted, a person seeks alternative ways of obtaining the drug in unregulated (black market) places. As technologists, we were fascinated with public ledger technologies like Blockchain. We were researching our own ways to build an enterprise blockchain that private entities can use to trust and transmit confidential information. Immutable ledgers were gaining traction and during a fun Friday lunch discussion, we stumbled on this article from Pega - Leveraging digital technology to impact the opioid crisis This inspired us to marry Pega and Enterprise blockchain together to develop a solution. We lingered on this for a year or so till Covid hit. We started reading reports about opioid overdose crisis hitting the entire world and the time came to put the pen to paper. When the Pega Hackathon 2021 invite came out, it dawned on us that this would be the perfect platform to showcase how these two technologies can work together to track every stage of opioid lifecycle – from manufacturing to distribution, prescription, and consumption. We wanted to deploy technology for good and the solution we have developed will restrict the selling of opioid drugs in unregulated markets.

What we learned

We learnt the human cost of opioid overdose crisis and the negative impact it is having around the world. Over 136 people die every day from an opioid overdose including prescription and illicit opioids (Source: CDC) and we learnt blockchain can serve as the trusted platform to multiple disparate parties and they could enhance the transparency of opioid manufacturing and distribution. When it comes to the technical implementation, we learnt the technical details for enterprise blockchain was not easy to setup. It involves many hours of dedicated research and experimentation before we could get the chain code infrastructure stood up. We wanted to run this infrastructure on Kubernetes and so having Hyperledger and Pega scale automatically using Kubernetes pod scaling was initially a technical challenge as we had to understand the container networking in depth.

What it does

The goal of this project is to increase the transparency of opioid manufacturing and distribution supply chain using Blockchain technologies. Blockchain is implemented here using Hyperledger Fabric. Since blockchain is an immutable ledger, entries made cannot be tampered with. So, right from the start when an order is placed for opioid till it reaches the pharmacy, order status details are posted to Blockchain ledger so transparency is maintained. This application showcases the use of utilizing an iBPM platform like Pega interacting with a privately provisioned blockchain to track opioid lifecycle so opioid cannot be easily sold in unregulated markets. It is the start of many possibilities of marrying Pega with blockchain technologies to solve transparency and trust issues in any supply chain activities.

How we built it

The project was built using Hyperledger fabric (Blockchain), REST APIs and Pega 8.4. Both the systems interacted using APIs and we ensured relevant that gateway traffic was only allowed for whitelisted network configurations.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial challenge was to believe in our technical abilities to be a trailblazer team and not give up when we hit any technical challenges. Although our solution is not a fully finished product, it has all the great foundational elements to evolve into a useful platform that could be used by any enterprise companies that is involved in the opioid manufacturing and supply chain. Running this on a scalable Kubernetes platform was a humbling experience for our team and the challenges of configuring Hyperledger nodes communication was huge during the initial phases of the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Setting up an enterprise blockchain with authorization and integrating that with Pega was a technical win for us. On top of it, we see endless possibilities of using blockchain technologies with Pega and we are planning to release more solutions for our clients based on the foundational layer we have built.