du, from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC), has announced its latest Blockchain Platform as a Service (BPaaS) use case by entering into a collaboration with Dhonor HealthTech – a leading national company focused on global healthcare blockchain solutions – to build the UAE’s first Patient Safety Blockchain Solution.

Building on its commitment to championing innovation to create a better society for all, du’s BPaaS use case will empower and enrich lives through the country’s first patient-centric safety verification blockchain solution. This builds on the telco’s proud legacy of delivering life-changing technological solutions and will support the nation’s progress towards achieving the UAE Blockchain strategy 2021 in creating a paperless economy and digitally transform the country.

Not only is Blockchain used for data integrity over a decentralized network, but it also ensures high security and transparency of data that allows a patient-centric approach to Blockchain in healthcare. This incorporates direct communication with key stakeholders, access to healthcare resources, and verification of authentic medicines, which are the main drivers of the Patient Safety Blockchain solution.

This solution is design on du’s Blockchain platform as a service (BPaas) in order to provide authenticity and compliance traceability that delivers the transparency and trust that has eluded the healthcare industry to date. With immutable data, it has the potential to give all stakeholders access to reliable information, including the origin, state, and viability of use for medical products. The solution is based on NFC tags standards that enable access to Blockchain solution in order to verify if blood bags and pharmaceutical products are authentic across the medical supply chain.

du’s BPaaS is a cloud native blockchain infrastructure that can provision private blockchain networks with a high level of customization, support multiple consensus algorithms, with monitoring, managing capabilities and smart contract capabilities which will give its users the ability to create blockchain networks, deploy and run their use cases, using intuitive UI(User interface). Without much knowledge of Blockchain networks configuration and DevOps, the platform supports Etherum and Hyperledger Fabric v1.3 frameworks.

The solution therefore ensures patient’s safety and solves the problems of many patients encountering counterfeit medications and wait times for trusted blood bags.

‘Saving lives through technological innovations’

Jihad Tayara, Vice President Business Development and Partnerships- New Business & Innovation, du, said: “du continues to be at the forefront of blockchain adoption in the UAE, and our BPaaS is a direct response towards supporting the objectives of the country’s blockchain vision. BPaaS provides immense scalability, compatibility and cost efficiencies, but it also ensures high security and transparency of sensitive data. In the healthcare sector, protecting patient data is paramount, hence we are proud to implement the next deployment of BPaaS within the healthcare sector where it will contribute towards saving countless lives and raising the quality of care that patients receive.”

‘Empowering patients across the UAE’

“Through Dhonor’s core business tenet as an advanced patient safety platform, our ability to empower patients through innovative technological developments will be significantly enhanced with du’s BPaaS. The need for transparency and visibility to verify the authenticity and condition of the medicines that patients’ lives depends on is essential. By adopting blockchain into our everyday operations, this will be an important step towards the digitisation of the UAE’s healthcare sector and revolutionise patient-centricity,” said Wassim Merheby, Dhonor Healthtech, CEO and Co-Founder.

‘The First Patient Safety Blockchain Solution’

Patient-centric Safety standards are enabled with Patient Safety solution by checking & verifying of medicines and blood bags which helps the health authorities to address all 5 Patient Rights:

• Right Patient
• Right drug
• Right dose
• Right route
• Right time

Therefore, this collaboration addresses patient’s safety and solves the problems of many patients encountering counterfeit medications and wait times for trusted blood bags.

This most recent BPaaS use case builds on du’s strategic partnership announcement with ConsenSys to build the UAE’s first BPaaS, at GITEX technology week 2018. This was showcased through an exciting use case using smart contract capabilities to facilitate and automate the process of document and certificate attestation by government entities.