Intel plans to use blockchain technology to help fight the opioid crisis.

The blockchain will be used as the drug monitoring online ledger that cannot be changed or manipulated. The idea is to centralize the data in hopes to track drug supply leakage in the supply chain as well as prevent issues such as “double doctoring” which is when patients prescribe from multiple physicians. Currently, drug monitoring is only tracked on the state level which sometimes allow patients to travel between state lines to get new prescriptions. Intel in working with pharmaceutical companies such as McKesson Corp, Johnson & Johnson, and many other companies in hope to solve these issues. Looks like even the FDA has shown signs of interest.

Blockchain technology is good at interconnecting systems that don’t speak to each other. Many other company systems can use the ledger to track and communicate between different systems using the ledger as the main database. It has the potential to allow many different systems to be customized in their own way but as long as those systems use the same universally shared ledger, it would hypothetically provide an interconnected, possibly with the ability to locate problems on a global scale. A real world application usage that looks very promising!