Leveraging Blockchain with Optimal Deep Learning-Based Drug Supply Chain Management for Pharmaceutical Industries

Due to its complexity and involvement of numerous stakeholders,the pharmaceutical supply chain presents many challenges that companies must overcome to deliver necessary medications to patients efficiently.The pharmaceutical supply chain poses different challenging issues,encompasses supply chain visibility,cold-chain shipping,drug counterfeiting,and rising prescription drug prices,which can considerably surge out-of-pocket patient costs.Blockchain(BC)offers the technical base for such a scheme,as it could track legitimate drugs and avoid fake circulation.The designers presented the procedure of BC with fabric for creating a secured drug supplychain management(DSCM)method.With this motivation,the study presents a new blockchain with optimal deep learning-enabled DSCM and recommendation scheme(BCODL-DSCMRS)for Pharmaceutical Industries.Firstly,Hyperledger fabric is used for DSC management,enabling effective tracking processes in the smart pharmaceutical industry.In addition,a hybrid deep belief network(HDBN)model is used to suggest the best or top-rated medicines to healthcare providers and consumers.The spotted hyena optimizer(SHO)algorithm is used to optimize the performance of the HDBN model.The design of the HSO algorithm for tuning the HDBN model demonstrates the novelty of the work.The presented model is tested on the UCI repository’s open-access drug reviews database.

Bibliometric Analysis of Drug Supply Chain in China

Objective To study the development trend and hotspot of China’s drug supply chain in terms of bibliometrics to provide some reference for transforming and upgrading China’s pharmaceutical circulation industry.Methods Based on the data related to drug supply chain research from 1999 to 2019 collected by CNKI,Wanfang and VIP,software such as bibliographic information co-occurrence mining system(BICOMS)version 2.0,University of California Irvine Network(UCINET)version 6.0,and graphical clustering toolkit were used to measure and conduct visual analysis of the domestic drug supply chain research literature.Results and Conclusion Through literature analysis,it can be seen that the current research on drug supply chain in China mainly focuses on drug procurement and cost control,zero inventory control of hospital pharmacy,optimization and risk management of drug supply chain,and information of supply chain and logistics of pharmaceutical enterprises.Combining with the“Internet+”and other models,drug supply chain enterprise should optimize its management process according to the relevant national policy,promote information construction in all links of the supply chain,improve its transparency and ensure the quality and safety of drugs.The improvement of supply chain efficiency will enhance the transformation and upgrading of China’s pharmaceutical circulation industry.

The effects of medical insurance and patients’ preference on manufacturer encroachment in a pharmaceutical supply chain

With the development of e-commerce,manufacturers have opportunities to sell products to consumers through direct channels in addition to independent retailers.Although manufacturers’encroachment upon the retailing market of traditional goods has been extensively studied,there is a lack of research on manufacturers’encroachment in a pharmaceutical supply chain.This paper analyzes a pharmaceutical manufacturer encroachment strategy by taking into account the distinctive features of drugs,in which drug expenses are covered by medical insurance only in the physical channel and patients'channel preference is also considered.We find that under certain circumstances,the manufacturer encroachment may lead to a win-win outcome for both the manufacturer and the retailer,contradicting the conventional wisdom that the manufacturer's encroachment into retail space is detrimental to the independent retailer.Additionally,the manufacturer is more likely to encroach when the incurred extra cost is sufficiently small,the perceived quality of the drug selling through the direct channel is sufficiently high and the out-of-pocket percentage cost of the drug selling in the physical channel is high.We further study the impact of manufacturer encroachment on social welfare and find that the introduction of encroachment decreases the social welfare when patients'perceived quality of the drug obtained through the online store is low and improves the social welfare when the perceived quality exceeds a certain threshold.