U.S.-based Splunk is providing its operational intelligence solution for a pharmaceutical track and trace blockchain developed by LedgerDomain, the company said in a blog post.
Splunk is a $30 billion market cap listed company that develops software to monitor, report and analyze machine data. It uses machine learning to identify data patterns and provide metrics.
The company has developed the Splunk App for Hyperledger Fabric, a set of dashboards and analytics tools.
It integrated its app with the LegerDomain track and trace solution developed as part of a Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) pilot program initiated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
LedgerDomain teamed up with UCLA Health for the pilot that uses the BRUINchain application to track and trace drugs using 2D barcodes. The aim is to remove expired or counterfeit products from the supply chain. The two are members of the Hyperledger community, and the solution is built using Hyperledger Fabric.
UCLA Health consists of five facilities and over 200 clinics, which are supported by the in-house pharmacy department. The academic medical center provided real data for the blockchain pilot and integrated BRUINchain for DSCSA compliance.
BRUINchain is a mobile application that scans the drug barcode at every point in the supply chain. This creates an immutable log of movement of the drug from manufacturer to pharmacies and finally to the consumer.
The blockchain was able to verify a drug’s provenance by communicating with the manufacturer and notify when suspected products were scanned. It also reduced the amount of paperwork required, saving supply chain participants significant time.
Part of the project focused on measuring the reduction in compliance costs . The project partners estimated that a real-time responsive blockchain solution could save the U.S. pharma industry $183 million in annual labor costs.
Meanwhile, concerning Splunk’s contribution, the company said, “Our application allowed monitoring of performance, visualizations of transactions per second (tps), memory, etc. The insights that the application provided are essential to the study’s projection costs and tracing for the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry.”
Several pharma groups ran DSCSA FDA pilots. These included a consortium formed by IBM, KPMG, Merck and Walmart. And Mediledger published results of its FDA blockchain pilot, which it conducted with Walgreen, Walmart, FedEx, seven manufacturers and the three big pharmaceutical wholesalers that account for 94% of U.S. sales.
