Blockchain and corporate reputation: could distributed ledger technology help (re)build trust in pharma? 2

http://www.repman.com.tr/en/2012/08/the-value-of-corporate-reputation/

Reputation, corporate and personal, is an intangible asset of immense value. Building a positive reputation can be time-consuming, costly and difficult. Having your reputation ruined can, contrarily, be horribly easy and take but a moment. That is why corporations the world over – pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations are no exceptions – spend a lot of time, money and effort on ensuring their reputation. For Pharma, self-evidently, this is so that their “customers” – patients, physicians and the wider healthcare industry – trust their medicines and supporting product services, and so continue to use them.

A lot has been written about reputation and trust – in both organizations and in individuals. This article is not about how individuals manage and build their reputation. In this piece I explore how the reputation of organizations, more specifically the corporate reputation of pharmaceutical companies, could be significantly enhanced by their wider use of blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT). I shall not go into great detail on what a blockchain is, but a good definition comes from a report by Deloitte (http://deloitte.wsj.com/cfo/2016/02/26/beyond-bitcoin-blockchain-is-coming-to-disrupt-your-industry-weekend-reading/), which defines a blockchain as:-

“… a digital, distributed transaction ledger, with identical copies maintained on multiple computer systems controlled by different entities. Anyone participating in a blockchain can review the entries in it; users can update the blockchain only by consensus of a majority of participants. Once entered into a blockchain, information can never be erased; ideally, a blockchain contains an accurate and verifiable record of every transaction ever made.”

More pertinently for this article, blockchain is a distributed, immutable and transparent platform of trust. It is that immutability (or “un-changeability”) and transparency which I believe could enable blockchain tech to add a new, complementary layer of trust to organizations like Pharma, and so help to build, bolster and in some cases rebuild corporate reputation.

But why should a focus on Pharma corporate reputation be relevant now? Across the globe, people’s trust in big corporations is diminishing. A survey, albeit from some time ago, suggested that the top three factors that the general public take into account when making a judgement about a company are: Quality of Products/Services (25%), Customer Service (21%) & Treatment of Staff (20%) (http://www.angelfire.com/journal2/comunicarse/corp-rep.pdf). Every time there is a recall of a household product, or a leak of personal data, or the suggestion that a major corporation has “bent the rules” to improve their bottom line rather than meet customer or ecological goals, the reputation of Big Business diminishes.

Pharma is far from immune to such reputational challenges. In fact over the last one to two decades trust in Pharma and its products has been reducing and reducing. Counterfeit medicines, inappropriate prescribing (e.g. the current opioid crisis), the increased cost of drugs, even suggestions of clinical trial result tampering, as well as an overall perceived lack of transparency in their processes and core science, have led to this erosion of Pharma corporate reputation. This is despite such open-science initiatives as https://clinicaltrials.gov/.

Historically, reputation in Pharma and its products has been channeled through 3rd parties: the patient “trusts” the medicine because the physician, who the patient trusts, has prescribed it. The physician “trusts” the product because s/he trusts that the FDA has done its job to regulate and validate the new medicine, etc. I am not saying that trust in physicians or the FDA is reducing, but if there were another, complementary reputation and trust protocol that the “customers” of Pharma could consult, would that not help Phama improve its wider reputation? Blockchain technology can be that complementary trust protocol. But how? Through blockchain tech’s ability to enable openness and transparency.

Perhaps the biggest source of suspicion that the general public has opposite Pharma is a perceived lack of transparency. When a patient takes a medicine, they want to trust that medicine. They want to be sure, firstly, that it contains the drug it says it does; and secondly that the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) has been thoroughly and properly researched, developed and manufactured using fully regulated, validated and trusted processes. One of blockchain’s core and fundamental properties is its transparency over the audit trail or “chain” of transactions it contains. In the case of a prescribed medicine, that audit trail represents the supply chain from manufacturer via wholesaler(s) and pharmacy to patient. Regardless of whether the supply chain transactions are stored on an open public, permissionless blockchain (such as Ethereum) or on a private, closed, permissioned blockchain (such as Hyperledger), it is possible for anyone to see the transactions that are stored there. They are transparent. In this area of medicines’ supply chain and serialization (https://www.pharmamanufacturing.com/articles/2015/serialization-drug-quality-security-act/), blockchain technology is already attracting a huge amount of attention as it could dramatically help to reduce the global incidence of counterfeit medicines (https://www.nasdaq.com/) because it would allow patients to see the provenance of the medicine they hold in their hands, right back to the manufacturing site.

Protecting trust in the final product is one area where Pharma’s corporate reputation is already being rebuilt using blockchain tech. But how the organization gets to that final product – the discovery, development and manufacturing processes, as well as the underlying science behind the API – also warrants more openness and transparency. Blockchain tech can help here too. I have already written about how the discovery process and the potential for blockchain-enabled electronic lab notebooks (ELNs), which capture the details of those processes, could make that part of the medicines’ discovery value chain (see figure) more transparent (https://www.ddw-online.com/informatics/p320746-blockchain-technology-in-drug-discovery:-use-cases-in-r&d.html).

Trusting the science itself, usually achieved through peer-reviewed publication in reputable journals, is another important way for other scientists and the general public (if they are interested) to ‘prove’ that the science is genuine, correct and real. But trust in even this has been eroded by “bad actor” scientists publishing doctored or even wholly fabricated results. Blockchain technology can help here too, and I have previously published an article on how blockchain tech could help reduce data doctoring and falsification (http://www.bio-itworld.com/2018/02/07/scientific-data-doctoring-could-blockchain-technology-help-stamp-it-out.aspx).

It is my belief, therefore, that blockchain technology can help restore trust in the medicines we all rely on to stay healthy and to regain our health in the event we get ill. It can help us trust the underlying science of Discovery. It can help us trust even more the good laboratory, manufacturing and clinical practices that underpin Development (https://www.pharmaguideline.com/2017/01/concept-of-gxp-in-pharmaceuticals.html), and it can help us trust the provenance of the actual medicines we take. And if we trust the medicines themselves, surely we would trust more the discoverers, the developers and the producers of those medicines – the pharmaceutical companies.

Finally, companies the world over have historically used three components to help drive their businesses: Cost, Quality & Time. Reduce the cost; increase the quality; reduce the time to market. There is now a fourth dimension: Reputation. Blockchain tech can be a big contributor to help increase reputation across all aspects of business.