EBC22 | A Digital Trust Ecosystem for Healthcare

hello everyone hello many thanks for joining us today on this panel uh titled farmer ledger a digital trust healthcare ecosystem and today we're going to get multiple perspectives from a business legal tech governance and technology standpoint my name is dr hikirit verdi i co-lead the work package responsible for the culture and adoption of blockchain technology within industry and i previously worked as a doctor and before that a pharmacist and i have an interest in digital health distributed ledger technologies and decentralization so um now we're going to kind of hand over to the panelists and we're going to get a quick intro from each panelist i will start i thought you might get shorter but anyway so my my name is marco cuomo i'm working for novartis i'm an i.t guy who's an architect and informal lecturer i'm the co-lead of the platform hi my name is james gannon i am the vice president of quality trust and safety for the pharma ledger association i'm paulo miliary i'm working for msd i'm coming from the at and in pharmaceutical uh i led the use cases selection okay hi i'm lucas oscar i'm part of the bayer team in the pharma nature consortium and i'm here in crypto since 2013 and uh now since one half years also working for the farm ledger project and they are the i.t implementation lead for bayer okay so that's a quick intro from everyone so my first question is to paulo could you give a a recap of you know why the consortium was established and you know where we are in terms of uh project outputs in terms of pharma ledger today yeah for sure i mean it's very important really to explain that because i mean i was talking with the guys outside and they're very surprised that we as for malaysia pharmaceutical company we are using blockchain technology okay yeah so they were really i'm astonished to do that so starting from the very beginning okay farmer ledger is a initiative between it's a public private and public initiative between pharmaceutical company and the european community okay it's uh it's it's a three-year project okay bringing together 29 partner okay 29 parted between pharmaceutical company institution uh i would say research university patient association hospital so very the real player of the healthcare okay with the 22 million budget okay that is coming to the end because we started almost three years ago we are going to finish in 2022. the aim of the project is really to create a platform which gives the the patient okay to improve okay and they really improve the patient experience at the other day and we are using the blockchain technology not just for building the platform but also building the the app that the patient can use you know to improve is is is his experience okay just to give you an example okay on the supply chain uh is an end-to-end project i mean i mean it's an end-to-end flow of information and also think that where the patient is at the end of our supply chain okay until yesterday the patient was not concluding in the supply chain now we are thinking also to add the patient at the end of our supply center it starts from the ingredient and goes to finish to the pa do to the patient okay and we have been very pragmatic since the beginning and we have been selected something of from ten use cases we have been selecting something of nine that we are going to implement divided in three domain okay the supply chain of course as you do before and we have also the um clinical trial and the patient experience so the patient data in which the patient can really share the data with the who they reward knowing what they are using through the trusted environment okay perfect that's awesome so as paolo mentioned you know the first year of the project was which business cases showed the most value proposition for blockchain technology for patients so the first year focused on i guess design and foundations the second year was about building so development and deployment and now we're in we're halfway through the last year of the projects we've got about seven months left and the narrative for this year is um you know sustainability and validation of the project once it finishes at the end of this year so again farmer ledger's initial vision was to develop a widely trusted platform for the adoption and uh innovation of blockchain-enabled patient-centric solutions that was our initial i guess vision and now we've transitioned to what we're calling uh you know farmer ledger being a digital trust ecosystem so um yeah the next question is for marco could you could you break down what a digital trust ecosystem is for us and and you know why is farmer ledger transitioning from blockchain-enabled healthcare to a healthcare digital trustee ecosystem yeah when we started a couple of years ago we had in mind to build the infrastructure of the healthcare and healthcare system so we wanted to build um first we said let's build a blockchain infrastructure for the healthcare industry because we see a lot of use cases and every use case has first to build the infrastructure which is a hurdle for the use case so we said let's build with this project the infrastructure so that future use cases can just jump on it and then we we created the term blockchain enabled healthcare but we realized very quickly this is not enough it's not about infrastructure it's not about the blockchain technology itself we need to build the ecosystem around it how do we govern it um how we bring people to this ecosystem how can we make it trustful in a let's say trustless environment so then we realize what we're really building is a digital trust ecosystem um which the backbone is a blockchain technology or a ledger based technology so that is what we really wanted to build but we also realized just a platform there without use cases makes no sense so we need the use cases so that was paolo mentioned before we need a couple of use cases to showcase what is the potential but what we really want in the future is that we have this infrastructure and that any new use case which someone comes up can just jump on it and has not to focus how to build the blockchain stuff how to build the governance around it blah blah blah no can just go and sing here i have a use case i can jump in their pharma lecture and i have already ecosystem i have to pharma companies i have governance i know where to go and can quickly build something that's the idea so we are at the very beginning now but this is what we envision with the digital trust ecosystem for the healthcare industry and we can also see other industries uh doing something similar perfect thank you so as yeah as paolo mentioned the kind of three domains within pharma ledger clinical trials healthcare data and supply chain and we have eight use cases and the most advanced use case is electronic product information and this is essentially a a patient-centric uh digitized application of the paper information leaflet that's inserted into the medication box and this is the most advanced use case but there's you know seven more use cases so you know matching patients to having a blockchain based matching utility service for recruitment of patients into decentralized clinical trials along with you know anti-counterfeiting uh features so how do i know i've got a genuine product what is the provenance of my product where does it come from and then we look into the supply chain use cases which is finished goods traceability and clinical supply chain and the the other use cases are related i guess to clinical trials specifically in terms of remote trial management so electronic consent so so normally when a patient wants to enroll on a clinical trial they have to fill out a lot of paperwork to give their consent to participate in the in the trial we're looking at uh digitizing that consent and sharing it among all the players within the clinical trial kind of ecosystem and the other use cases are to do with interoperability so using the internet of things as well as personalized medicine so personalized wearables you know using that data and transaction uh with that data through through a decentralized clinical trial so those are our you know our use cases it's a plethora of different use cases but the most advanced one is electronic product information and we've uh the team at farmer ledger we've managed to stand up seven uh nodes in in different pharmaceutical uh companies um so marco could you kind of please explain how the pla platform architecture has been structured and built to form this uh this network for epr sorry this is a bit tricky we're supposed to have a picture up here but they can't find the slide so good luck thank you um what else should i do now no i got it i got it um so when we started with pharma ledger we we said we cannot define the blockchain technology let's say the people always asking what are you using for formulation hyperledger or this or hyperledger fabric or this so that we said that can we not approach that we define in 2019 or 20. this is the blockchain technology we do it let's say permissioned or whatever so we said we need something more flexible so what we say is um every use case so we call it in our product so electronic product information can come with their own blockchain technology that can be hyper electric fabric that can be quorum that can be whatever whatever you like it can be a public a hybrid permissioned or private one it doesn't matter for us important is we have built a middleware layer between it we call that opendsu dsu stands for data sharing units in enterprise world it's all about data and we put that middleware layer between basically the blockchain technology or the blockchain network and the application on top of it so you can imagine the colors would be if you see the picture not a picture would be here yellow is the blockchain part the green part is the middleware layer it's also framework for developers so the for the developers it's easy then to work with the blockchain because we abstract the blockchain technology it's basically really read write data and on top of it in a in a blue color would be the application the normal stack you technology stack you use for your web web application mobile app whatever it is so we built basically from the beginning we say we don't want we want to be agnostic to the technology the blockchain technology the only thing we use is this what we call opendsu this middleware layer also framework for the developers that gives a lot of freedom so we can basically change anytime the underlying technology for the up and the application has nothing to be changed and this is also gives us the the freedom in the future if they're better new faster whatever blockchain comes around the corner we can replace that without interrupting basically the business um for the use cases uh which they're up to come that's the idea behind it so this is our layered architecture perfect thank you thanks for that breakdown my next question is for lucas hi lucas you work as a blockchain architect for bayer exactly and you've been involved or focusing on the electronic product information and the finished goods traceability use cases could you um describe some of the i guess greatest challenges and opportunities you've had during this implementation yes for sure um so yeah i've joined the whole farm manager project about one and a half years ago before i've been already working at bayer yeah i would say cloud architect or it project manager for about seven years but personally i've been very interested in crypto as said earlier since 2013 um so the crypto world as you all know is developing quite fast and then i came for the first time also from a corporate job perspective into the whole blockchain topic into former ledger and i got to know the opendsu architecture and i thought okay that makes sense let's go and implement it and the first steps actually work quite fast and so everyone who has set up a blockchain node knows if the code is out there we are currently using a go chrome if the code is out there you can set up a blockchain node quite fast and you can have the first results quite fast but then uh i know why the project time frame actually yeah still had two years um um yeah as time to actually implement all of it um because then the first challenge is started and so as you know and i said uh in crypto everything develops quite fast and when it comes to corporate i.

t landscapes that's unfortunately not always the case um or not that often the case i would say um so when we started implementing formulator at bayer the first blockchain note has been set up quite fast but then you are discussing something like okay we don't want to have a sandbox environment just for bayer but we really would like to have a decentralized environment together those novartis johnson and johnson merck and many other companies um so the first question is then okay how is everyone going to deploy their blockchain node how can we interconnect them so that's not a public network that you can just join but you have to ramp up a completely new network because we are currently yeah just a private blockchain network and then you come to a lot of questions around deployment around of how to do change processes how do we make any blockchain upgrade how do we make upgrades to the software itself um and uh yeah that really took a lot of time because of all those difficult processes that corporates unfortunately have internally and yeah due to the diverse it landscapes i would say and even if you have a running network it's still not connected to all the other processes that we have in our corporate world so every company has an erp system like sap every company has to integrate it but not as not every sap system even if all the companies are using sap is the same sap system there is so much customize that it uh yeah it takes a very long time until you really bring up a full i.t ecosystem that really works and can support all those um yeah those challenges but on the other side to also mention this and from an opportunity perspective i found it quite amazing to work together with all the other companies to get to know about their it landscape about their challenges everyone has a different cloud architecture for example everyone is using different public clouds but they also have completely different approaches when it comes to security um gxp regulation uh when we are talking about pharma and uh there seems to be no uniformity at all where you think there would be some sort of loving level playing field for everyone to kind of operate in so thanks for have you got any more to add or we we're good we're good i can just encourage everyone who's not working in blockchain yet if you're working completely out of the industry um a blockchain project from my perspective also just makes sense to talk to other companies get to know their environment better and to work on a joint goal and that's kind of amazing awesome thank you so as mentioned we're in the final year of the pharma ledger project um this is all about sustainability and validation of the project outputs at the end of this year and i'm pleased to announce that the pharma ledger association has been formed which is a a non-for-profit uh legal entity that will validate the products uh from the farmer ledger association and um uh you know james is working as the vp of quality uh trust and safety at the farmer ledger association so i guess uh james could you kind of like uh break down what is the the mission and vision of of the pla um you know what do we expect in terms of short and long-term goals uh going forward yep so like the the goal with the pla is you know as paolo and others have talked about we're at the end of this three-year research phase let's call it you know where we've come up with an architecture we've come up with some products we don't have anything out in the market right now okay and the the big challenge from a healthcare industry point of view even bigger than just pharma is we're heavily regulated we're probably the one of the most regulated industries out there so we have a lot of obligations from a regulatory point of view on how we qualify the system how you test it how you deploy it in a secure and controlled manner lots of operating procedures around these things so we very quickly realized about 18 months ago when i joined the project looking at it from a regulatory and compliance point of view that we needed an entity that would sit in the middle as a neutral trusted venue that would essentially perform that regulatory action and then act as a pseudo vendor almost but with no cost involved to all of the pharmaceutical companies so this way we we gain the trust and regulatory compliance over the software and over the platform but without having any centralized authority piece being put in place because all we do at the the pharma ledger association is we'll perform the regulatory validation and then we will hand those containers package binaries etc over to the pharmaceutical companies to run under their quality management systems and their controls so really you know the goal of the pla is we're trying to create this venue not just for you know we will obviously start with the existing use cases that we have but i i can't stress enough similar to what lucas was saying like in in i've been doing pharma and emerging tech and pharma for about 14 years now this is the first time that i've really seen the whole industry come together you know not just the pharma companies we have patient organizations we have research universities all with a really singular goal here and to get everybody around the table in that way and thinking and working in the same way we see a huge opportunity with the pla you know we're building the bylaws at the moment setting out the principles of how we want to operate it and we want it to be a venue for decentralized technology for open source platforms you know like the the example i always give is if we look at the fintech industry and if you look at open source fintech projects out there approximately 2000 of them give or take do you want to know how many there are in pharma there's one so like we have this whole area that we're able to expand into if we have this kind of trusted venue for collaboration and really that's what we want the pla to be is where all stakeholders that are interested in in the healthcare ecosystem can come together and collaborate on new technologies you know and that will include patients you know we will obviously have the the more corporate players coming in and providing the funding and stuff like that the the pla is a not-for-profit registered in switzerland you know we're not here to to launch a coin we're not here to make money out of it it's going to be just our operating costs but we want to bring together a venue where a patient can come along and we're building a new piece of tech that's patient-facing they're going to be able to sit down and give their input into it so that we're kind of flipping the narrative a bit rather than you know big pharma giving these apps to patients and hoping that it goes well we want to actually build these things bottom up from to be very patient-centric and we've seen a lot of that with the epi app you know we've entirely revamped our ui ux around that based on direct patient feedback you know we have a great relationship engagement with european patients forum and they've given us actual patient groups for us to trial the app with and we've had you know real world patients looking at going oh no that just doesn't work at all for us but then we're actually able to reincorporate that advice back into the the product and really that's we we want this to be something scalable it needs to be sustainable and you know this is not something that given we're not for profit we will have operating costs and we need to make sure we cover those operating costs but we don't have a goal of you know we don't need to pay back venture capitalists we don't have to have huge money around this it's really about building that ecosystem piece so it's it's a really exciting time and you know one of the next steps obviously will be that we'll open this up next year for membership and you know we're going to have an innovation lab where you might be able to you know bring your ideas into the pla these are all still things that we're working out but we really want you know exactly the type of folks that show up to a conference like this to be able to get involved in a really concrete manner and you know he like this is not like the usual kind of i guess big big play with big pharma like who can who will be able to join the association is this for you know little fish as well as big fish yeah so like one of the things that we've looked at is a from a legal entity point of view so like if you look at corporate members let's call them we want a really scaled model where that if you're a small development company for example in healthcare and you only have 10 employees we need to obviously price our membership fees very reasonably so that you're able to join it's not a big hurdle for them but at the same big you know big pharma companies like myself i work for novartis as my normal day job you know msd buyer that they're able to to have a almost like a patronage where they'll bring together much larger membership fees to run the the core operations and then particularly in that the lab that i was speaking about you know that's where the the ground up kind of blank piece of paper innovation is going to happen so that's where we want to be able to bring individuals in you know so if you're an individual open source developer you're an individual patient or you have a piece of expertise that you can think you can bring to the the table you know we'll have projects there that will just be open for anybody to join no membership fees no requirement to pass a certain bar or anything else so it'll be really kind of multi-stakeholder and open so yeah thanks for covering that so if you know if if an entity joins uh the pla or the pharma ledger association um i guess what they're going to get is a validated product for electronic product information that can be used in both a patient and an industry population um could you talk about partic like potential kind of business models we've got for the first year for the association yeah so like one of the big things will be that you know in order to meet that regulatory compliance piece um when you come in as a formal member you know a corporate member of the the association you'll get this validated product so validated from a regulatory point of view something that will pass fda scrutiny and that's going to be the the big payback for your membership fees there so like that's how we're going to really drive the initial membership free revenue and to cover our core operations and then obviously in the future we'll expand out into the new use cases and you know bring up new projects and we the hope is that as we start expanding that essentially we become the long tail of the industry from a technology point of view because you know particularly looking at smaller farming pharma companies so not every pharma company has 150 000 employees like novartis there's plenty out there with 100 200 employees so if you're bringing a new drug to market like being able to adopt a pharma ledger solution and not have to worry about that you know you are doing it out of the box as something that you just get along with your membership fees it's not something we're going to charge directly for that we hope will really accelerate the long tail of adoption in the industry and also them being able to to work with the other ecosystem players that are there you know the not-for-profits the public health care facilities the hospitals doctors patients you know that's again it's something that is very heavy and hard to do when you're in industry so again having this neutral venue to do that is something that we hope will really speed up adoption over time thank you james so the farmer ledger association has been formed we're awaiting a second endorsement but a first endorsement has been done successfully within the existing consortium at pharma ledger so now we finally have a legal entity to kind of look into the future but there's still work that needs to happen with the electronic product information use case um so paulo could you give us uh uh i guess uh some foresight into the future we've we've worked with sapi which is uh the singapore associations of pharmaceutical industries to run a roof run a proof of concept there could you um maybe talk about some of the key learnings and some of the future markets that we've got planned yeah as i was saying before okay epi is one of the i mean coming starting from the 100 use case that we have selected that we are then went to do eight okay now i would say we selected one to be able to be implemented right we selected the electronic information is the one that is is the best piece of paper that you you may find okay in your in in in the product most of the time you don't read okay so but it's very important it's very regulated okay there is a lot of complexity behind that okay so but we have chosen this use case because i mean is really the one that is common toward the pharmaceutical company is interact directly with the patient that you can open a channel a direct channel with a patient okay and really be able to really interact with him okay with them so the idea is really first of all starting on the side that yeah pharmalege is a european project but all pharmaceuticals are global okay so we started from i mean do mainly two to pilot one is in singapore the other one will be in the belgium by the way because belgium there is also the european community there it could help us to really interact with them okay so the first thing was really as we were saying okay if a manager has to leverage the patient so the first interaction we have we really talking with the patient and trying to understand how you want to do that okay so how are you able to interact with the electronic system what is the value for you for the paper okay so we are really learning from them okay and try to really do a process from the bottom okay and really prepare both okay the user experience from that you should be completely different and create a channel with them okay so now we have finished the first let's say poc more than a pilot in singapore now we are doing something that is really more deeper in the european we are working with the uh the canada institution okay authorities in order to understand how to work together in order to make this happen okay and uh the next step that we are going to do here is to really try to understand how to help the ukrainian refugees okay because you used to think that they are all split around the europe okay they sometimes they got medicine but they cannot read what they are doing so the approach that we are trying to understand is how to really be able to interact with them in order they can get their leaflet even if the product is i don't know is a pollen product is whatever okay so you can really give them the right information with the right languages okay so it's really something that we are trying to understand it should be open and this will all help just not to reduce give the right patient the right information the next step will be maybe you need to really get not all the leaflets but according your pathology you can really get just what you need and you can really we can really take advantage of what you are reading or to personalize your e-leaflet okay even better okay so it's it's you are really just at the beginning starting to to think how to interact and again it's not a problem of technology it's a problem of lack of understanding for the institution we are really trying to understand how interact with the european community that for us for for them really go electronic means to have a pdf okay so that yes it is electronic but i mean you can really get even more how that is the thing so the approach is really step by step and again it's not a technology that's created but it's also to educate there is a lack of understanding of the technology within our institution that we nearly to educate thank you paulo and i guess the the ethos for for farmer ledger and the pharma association is that we want to be uh you know we're open we're going to be open source we want to be inclusive we want to have a neutral uh playground for farmer to kind of come together um and so i guess this is to all the panelists from like a business legal technology technical standpoint um what do you foresee is some of the i guess biggest challenges uh going forward for for the farmer ledger association from marketing yeah you want to start okay go for it um yeah from a challenge and also opportunity perspective um maybe uh starting with the challenges as already said earlier currently or in the last one year we have struggled a bit with having all the deployment processes and everything in place to actually establish the network the next step is now as also james said to get everything of that in a compliant regulator regulated environment and then we really need uh stable operations i would say and good change management so that we can really deliver all the nice services that we have for our patients and that we can really deliver them in a very good quality and another point uh i would like to point out here that is a challenge but also a very big opportunity is a topic about integration so we already see now that there are also other blockchain projects being established within the pharma industry maybe not always by farmer manufacturers but maybe by wholesalers or other suppliers and um in the future uh for sure we build an open network but we have really to ensure that we integrate and that we can integrate with all these different other networks um so in crypto it's currently a big topic talking about blockchain bridges and that will be also a big topic for us i think um in the upcoming months and years but also a big opportunity cool thank you lucas uh paulo how much with time you have there is a lot of time okay there is a lot of challenges i see starting from the problematic point of view i will say the found okay so at the end of the end to 2022 we are going to finish our 22 million budget okay and now we really our approach will become a global approach okay using the blockchain at the moment i mean the pharmaceutical company doesn't see the blockchain as an investment and something that can really get money okay so that will be the first really approach okay how we can really build in order to have all the partner of the pharmaceutical association really find the right value in order to invest with this okay so that is very pragmatic approach okay the second one is we need to really learn to work together okay because i mean the pharmaceutical company they are quite big okay so you think of pfizer msd no art is buyer okay so really working together in the last three years has been very challenging okay so now we are really working together but i mean it's still something that uh and i'll say the last one and i'll stop because after a while we can really go hide for foreign really the technology is not the problem okay you will find always a solution using the technology always okay is the environment they need to really to be understand what we are going to do and help us to grow okay sorry the last one last one okay the thing is that that are really and also be able to take on board both big guys like pharmaceutical company or maybe big guys as a world series but also small technology company okay that can contribute to us to really grow and always maintain your approach okay because that is something that really it becomes difficult thank you james so i'm going to do some audience participation so who here has ever worked for a large company over a thousand people okay i would say 50 of the audience who here has ever worked for a regulated company so finance nuclear energy okay but a third okay so if i told you that when we're doing this through the association what we're actually doing is we're doing something brand new that our regulators have never seen okay so globally that's all of our regulators we have to educate and convince that no this is viable and it works and most of our companies are competitors again try and think about having to coordinate amongst all of your competitors in an antitrust safe manner how we are going to build something together that actually benefits us all and patients that is just a huge cultural challenge and that's the hardest piece to overcome and it is actually also the reason that i'm most optimistic about pharma ledger because we we've built something already if if we could finish the regulatory piece tomorrow we could launch and just the fact that we've got to that point and we've actually built something collaboratively between 12 major pharma companies research universities patients that's that's our biggest challenge and our biggest success to date so that's why i'm hopeful and that's why i'm very committed to it thanks james okay what a surprise um the so the project the pharma lecture consortium ends by end of this year so that means we have to look for sustainability this is the formulation association but all pharma companies need to implement the nodes so in 2018 we were able to convince let's say 12 pharma companies to invest let's say 10 million um in creating something which just was labeled blockchain enabled healthcare and we do something there and and so maybe there was a good time in 2018 to do that so it worked now we have the same issue or the same situation where we have to convince again pharma companies to invest in a project in this case more concrete the electronic product information to make it sustainable for for the future so and here i see a little bit our challenge we have to convince again pharma companies to invest in something in a project in internal projects for them a couple of millions not much i mean compared to the size and and also something like they not get immediately the money back for that it's something yeah it's blockchain it takes a couple of years till you really get the let's say the value back for that so this is this is what i see a little bit as a challenge in the future to again convince the pharma companies to invest in something which they don't really understand in all details and another thing paolo you you forgot to mention the ukraine stuff i mean there's always you did i did okay so i was i was sleeping where you were okay but but we always when we go along we always find new um challenges coming surprisingly around the corner and we have to react on it which then brings up a little bit from our path which we then have again going back and making sure how we integrate that uh back in in our thing so so we have always something coming around the corner which surprising house like the thing i missed the ukraine stuff thank you marco and like i think one of the strongest things about farmer ledger is instead of each pharma company trying to push something we really have a level a playing ground we're all working together as one and it's not for a commercial gain this is this is for a public good this is this is for patients and so that concludes our panel today um do we have any questions at all um yeah thank you for this panel um yeah so pharma works with the with the tons and tons of technology vendors and um um my question is i don't hear anything of those vendors within this story uh is there a reason so now it like now it sounds like pharma is going to build their own tools this is maybe um this was from the very beginning we we we said it's not vendor-driven the whole thing so we really wanted to make sure it's from the pharma driven so we have no big vendor in it like sap accenture there's not there does not mean we reinvent everything and it's not mean we don't work with one of them but we have really said this is farmer driven so we don't want a vendor in let's say the consortium that was from the beginning we want to very much clear we also worked with little startup companies to to develop the things on top of it we use existing technology quorum and other things or kubernetes and whatever you need but from the beginning we want to make sure that we are not um yeah yeah ecosystem with the the big software vendor okay that it was our approach okay to be really open software that easy and are you looking to now that you went through a first phase and you got some pocs in place do you know explore collaborations and because i mean there's so many different softwares available like how do you how will you tap into that or link to that so that's that's the beauty of our use case model and the fact that we have the disintermediation between the middleware layer and the actual underlying blockchain that that can sit on top of so each project in each product that comes along can choose its own because different products would have different needs some will need you know rapid consolidation and some might have a longer consolidation timeline so that they will have the flexibility to choose what is best for their product that's why at the beginning i said the the layered architecture is that the blockchain technology is we are agnostic to the technology so we we can pick whatever we like on that it has not even in terry not even to be a blockchain technology whatever the use case fits best if i may have something is the the approach of the application on top of this let's say backbone that we are building that can be also implemented by third party taking advantage of the blackboard they connect the different uh i mean stakeholders that is i mean pharmaceutical company patient whatever so that is our idea okay so in the future this will become i would say it has to be saved because we are highly rated okay so there will be really rule but in theory there is also the ability to create up and that are independent to our ecosystem okay that is the idea yes uh i have a question uh the association will be open uh following the when when it opens uh to include other companies that are in the healthcare industry getting in the healthcare industry like amazon and google and apple that or our developing systems and apps to be part of the association and bring the technology in the association and see how it can work with the what you guys have established yeah so very much so we're taking the same approaches we have with our technology to how we do membership at the association essentially if you're a company that has a link to the healthcare ecosystem we're not defining what that link is that's up for the company to you know like google is a great example everybody thinks google's a search engine google's also a huge health healthcare company you know with great healthcare tech you know so like we will be open to those and they can come in at whichever level in our model that they wish and you know that will be up to the the company that wishes to join to define their level of participation if they just want to come in at a lower level and just observe or if they want to come in in a more strategic manner they'll be able to do that as well and if i had some the the the approach of the association we really think big but start more okay so it means that each when we start i mean the use cases we are going to start with the electronic product information okay the governance need to really represent the ecosystem so it means that when the way to the the formulator will grow is adding new use cases heading to the governance all the all the really entities that are part of the ecosystem okay so that it will be something that is gross in a way that is organic to the to the solution so we are not going to to to take on board i mean so solution on part that are not part of the ecosystem okay that is the idea okay the idea is that one at least at the beginning we will see what happened okay yeah the the ethos is not to control uh the network the the ethos is to be decentralized and help govern govern the network um i guess that concludes our oh we've got another five minutes or so oh sorry okay do we have any more um questions in the audience at all thank you hello uh thank you very much for this very interesting session um so i work in the pharmaceutical industry myself so can you uh yeah thank you okay um so if i understand correctly so use cases that you selected are grouped in three categories correct yes supply chains healthcare data and clinical trials i was wondering whether you could elaborate a bit more on the clinical uh trial um use cases or the approach that you're planning to take there yes so um uh what one of the um i guess problems with the existing consortium is because we didn't have a legal entity when we wanted to run a proof of concept of a decentralized clinical trial it was very difficult for us to operate in a clinical environment um so the the the use cases to related to clinical trials are first about consent so how do i know that patient is who they say they are um and right now um all of the data that's collected within a clinical trial looking at all the different stakeholders within that ecosystem it's completely siloed it's not shared between all of the players what we're doing is with i guess the blockchain architecture is having the ability to share that information with doctors with physicians with policy with with safety boards and so forth um in in terms of the other trial aspect is um the the use of personalized medicine and and iot so uh given kovid there was a huge shift from uh you know the standard clinical trial uh rationale to decentralize clinical trials but essentially all that was is was was taking patients away from the trial site and do it at home so it really depends on what's the regulatory compliance of what the data is actually being captured on the device um so once that data is then captured then be able to be able to to be shared among all the participants and knowing that you've got that consent knowing the person is consented digitally is is probably one of the the first steps to kind of uh kind of overcome um so yeah that's that's my kind of is that kind of hopefully that's kind of answered your your question but basically now we have a legal entity we will be able to take the validated electronic product information use case potentially in the future the e-consent or trial use case can can mature and graduate and be qualified from the pharma ledger association once that happens we can then use the application in a clinical or regulated hospital environment hi there hi uh how do you guys plan to market and scale the ecosystem across your target regions is that in the pipeline or is that something that you're still working on hiring the staff or what's the what's the plan there um we have one big use case which is the electronic product information and this is something we want to go live or productive pilot first in um let's say q1 next year pressure's on we had q4 but now it's q1 next year and we start with some markets like belgium canada and singapore and there are more waiting there are other 20 so our idea is then to go step by step in the different markets and and see how that develops we have also to learn how to operate this in a productive environment because it's blockchain technology it it's not that it's everything new for us but still we have to learn how how we manage that in an ecosystem it's not one pharma company is responsible for everything or the ledger association is not responsible for everything we just deliver the qualified product but then the pharma companies together are responsible for the network so how do we manage that all how do we monitor that how we make sure the operation so we go country by country out there and of course i think with the time we will be go more and more parallel and more countries but that's a step-by-step approach and again it is a balance between to be ready and also the openness of the institutional different market that will adopt it okay in singapore they are very open okay in europe when these there are people that say it will be happening in five years okay and so we are really really cherry-picking okay the different the different market according to where we are ready and when the solution are ready to open to that okay japanese japanese market is already really doing that okay and so that that is really a combination but in theory if our plan will go we are going to really to do to implement that four in 42 countries in the next two or three years okay yeah like that the the goal let's say is that essentially it grows organically because you know really what we're focusing on this year is building that strong corporate governance strong regulatory compliance so that we can get a product into the market and certainly i think you know if we manage to successfully launch that product and it works well like the organic growth we'll see out of that you know and in terms of the adoption we'll see in new companies wanting to get onto that train that's started you know i think we'll see organic growth then and then essentially with the model that we have of having this lab for the more innovative ideas you know we'll have new stakeholders on board then who can suggest new ideas who can then turn those into projects which will then become products so it almost becomes a flywheel effect internally okay so i think uh i think that concludes our panel discussion and q a so uh thank you very much thanks to the panelist and thank you to all thank you thank you very much [Applause]