UK’s Fastest Growing Online Pharmacy, UK Meds, to Implement Blockchain Technology with Stratis

Stratis, the company making blockchain easy, today announces a partnership with UK Meds, the UK’s fastest growing online pharmacy. The agreement sees UK Meds implement blockchain technology across its UK operations with plans to collaborate with the wider online pharmacy industry.

UK Meds is the fastest growing online pharmacy in the UK, handling between 3,000 and 4,000 patient prescriptions digitally each day. The company will deploy Stratis’ blockchain technology to improve patient safety across the online pharmacy sector as a whole, reducing instances of patients ordering multiple prescriptions.

By ensuring each patient’s request for a prescription is logged on a shared and immutable distributed ledger across a group of UK online pharmacies, the programme ensures patients can only access prescribed quantities of medication. Doctors dealing with online consultations and pharmacies preparing medication will have the ability to cross reference patients using a unique identifier assigned to each individual. Any previous request for medication across all online pharmacies in the programme will be easily referenceable using Stratis’ technology, ensuring patients receive correct prescriptions.

Joe Soiza, CEO at UK Meds commented: “Despite screening our own customers by IP addresses, phone numbers, cookies and many other factors, there isn’t a cross-industry solution to identify patients attempting to obtain multiple orders of drugs, with opioids being a particular example. Clearly our entire industry needs to come together to ensure we do everything possible to protect the vulnerable and utilizing Stratis’ technology can help us achieve that.”

He continued: “The Stratis Platform provides a highly secure blockchain solution that can be shared across the industry to provide a trusted and verifiable record of patient requests for medicine. We are initiating this programme, and we have over 10 online pharmacies onboard already. It’s our ambition for this to become the de facto standard across the entire UK industry.”

Chris Trew, CEO, Stratis Platform added: “This is a great example of blockchain being deployed where its unique qualities will make a real difference. Using traditional IT solutions to solve this issue would require significant expense and would undoubtedly be administered by a third-party organization. With blockchain, the industry can cooperate on the critical issue of patient safety using a shared version of the truth.”

Stratis’ technology will also be used to improve UK Meds’ own supply-chain by deploying Stratis’ Smart Contracts in C#, this is essentially code running on top of a blockchain enabling them to undertake specific tasks, at critical stages. In combination with track and trace logistics solutions, each shipment of medication will be logged on the blockchain when originally produced by the manufacturer, during points of distribution and again on arrival at UK Meds to certify pharmaceutical shipments are correctly packed, arrive in fine condition and remain securely sealed in the correct quantity.

Soiza added: “We decided to work with Stratis on this programme because their platform is written in C#, an accessible computing language for developers across our industry. Blockchain is completely new for us, and Stratis have consulted with us for many months to help get this off the ground.”

The deployment comes on the back of a string of new development milestones for Stratis, including the release of Stratis Sidechains and the successful launch of their Smart Contracts in C# platform.

Notes to Editors

UK Meds already has a wide range of measures in place to protect patients, for example:

• Advanced screening technology to identify patients attempting to make multiple orders for drugs from its website
• Reduced maximum order sizes for specific drugs that carry a risk of addiction
• Phone calls from clinicians to patients on their third order for drugs that carry a risk of addiction, often resulting in a refusal and GP referral
• Referral to drug addiction charities and support services for any patients identified as at-risk.

About UK Meds

UK Meds is the UK’s fastest growing online pharmacy and doctor service, providing convenient access to medication. All UK Meds medication is dispatched by fully qualified pharmacists operating from registered General Pharmaceutical Council pharmacies licensed in the UK. 

About Stratis

Stratis offer end-to-end solutions for development, testing and deployment of native C# blockchain applications on the .Net framework. The Stratis proprietary blockchain combines the latest advances in security and stability of Bitcoin with the latest breakthroughs in network speed, scalability, privacy and customization. Stratis help enterprises develop, test and deploy robust blockchain applications.