Cardinal Health Leverages Blockchain to Streamline Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

What You Should Know:

–  Cardinal Health and Chronicled announced a partnership to leverage a new blockchain-powered solution on the MediLedger Network to streamline operations across the pharmaceutical supply chain and enable a reliable, frictionless experience for pharmacies across the country. The new blockchain solution will allow Cardinal Health to optimize the complex process of pharmaceutical chargebacks and create greater connectivity for its suppliers and customers. 

– Chronicled, the administrator of the MediLedger Network, provides Cardinal Health and industry partners a shared decentralized infrastructure with real-time visibility to eliminate disputes and improve pricing accuracy. The blockchain-powered solution will enforce the accuracy and integrity of chargebacks submitted across Cardinal Health’s pharmaceutical supply chain.  

Impact of Chargeback (Pricing) Errors

Chargeback (pricing) errors can occur for many reasons, but the result is always manual processing, duplicate effort, and back-and-forth communication between trading partners to resolve them. Research studies have also shown an estimated $4 Billion in revenue leakage for suppliers that can be attributed to chargeback disputes. Suppliers, wholesalers, and GPOs are constantly looking for ways to reduce errors and streamline this process. 

Partnership Benefits

The Contracts & Chargebacks solution on the MediLedger Network will help Cardinal Health provide its partner suppliers and GPOs, a single source of truth for GPO membership, customer identifier data (ex. HIN, DEA, 340B), and contract pricing data that always stays completely aligned between trading partners on the network. The network itself then uses this aligned reference data to enforce chargeback accuracy. 

“Blockchain technology and increased collaboration across the industry is essential to driving efficiencies, reducing costly errors, and significantly improving the chargeback process,” said Craig Cowman, EVP of Global Sourcing for Cardinal Health.” Greater connectivity with our supplier partners is always a focus of ours and we’re excited to deploy this new solution to deliver higher quality results across our supply chain network.”