Current COVID 19 vaccine efforts have just received an added boost to monitor its temperatures while in cold storage. In particular, these temperature-sensitive vaccines such as the ones developed by Pfizer-BioNTech must be stored at subzero temperatures to maintain their efficacy, creating logistical hurdles to enable the speedy distribution of vaccines.
As such, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is working with blockchain platform, Hedera Hashgraph and digital asset tracking provider Everyware Ltd to keep a tamper-proof record-keeping system of the vaccines’ temperatures, ensuring accurate monitoring.
Everyware enables the tracking and monitoring of how the vaccines are kept at the appropriate temperatures which are then stored on Hedera’s network layer. According to Everyware’s technical director, Tom Screen, this maintains “the integrity of the data” and enables information to be “shared across the vaccine supply chain”. Therefore, this collaboration seeks to enhance the validity, transparency and traceability of data in the ongoing distribution efforts.
The project is currently being trialed at two hospitals in the UK before a wider roll-out is progressively implemented across the nation. Undeniably, this presents an additional use case of how distributed ledger technologies supersede traditional databases.
