Sweetbridge, a non-profit aiming to transform supply chain and logistics management with blockchain technology is teaming up with Natural Partners, a distributor and technology company that supplies healthcare providers with nutritional supplements for their patients. The partnership with Natural Partners adds to the number of companies that have joined the Sweetbridge Blockchain Alliance.
According to Todd Taylor, Sweetbridge advisor, the aim of the non-profit is to transform brittle, industrial-era commerce through a decentralised ecosystem that produces a faster, fairer value exchange.
By introducing Sweetbridge’s blockchain protocol in NP Script, Natural Partners will be able to offer healthcare providers a reliable way to authenticate and secure nutritional supplements, in addition to better tracking patient outcomes.
Speaking to CoinJournal, Taylor said that Sweetbridge will use its protocols to deliver product identity information as assets on a blockchain, across a shared network of suppliers, providers, retailers, and end customers who can self-maintain the product data in an immutable and trusted resource.
“Accurate, verifiable product information is the lifeblood of any business delivering discrete goods, especially if they are used for health-related purposes,” he added. “Sweetbridge can support the product life cycle of all supplements and goods the company will sell by giving suppliers a low-impact way to enter and maintain product information from source materials, to formulations and packages, as well as their location and state in the supply chain.”
Accordingly, the platform will provide a single version of the truth for buyers and consumers to reference that product information, Taylor said.
With the aid of the blockchain, partners and practitioners can leverage the shared ledger without the need to introduce new systems or expensive centralised services. Not only that, but the track and trace functionality has the potential to improve the industry. Adding to that, Taylor states that there is the opportunity to work on prescription automation to create a more holistic and complete wellness approach to healthcare.
“One of the main challenges in the U.S. and Europe is the lack of a holistic healthcare record,” Taylor said. “Having a singular, patient managed identity could lead to some great analytics to track success rates while encouraging more active participation of practitioners with their patients, and a much more proactive approach to wellness.”
With a network of over 30,000 wellness practitioners, it’s hoped that Natural Partners will be able to benefit from patient outcome information and provenance capability that will better serve and support its community.
“Having partners that are serving customers diverse industry ecosystems and markets is an important part of evolving our own development and delivery approach for our blockchain protocols,” Taylor explained. “Whether we are working with a health-related company like Natural Partners, or a high-tech electronics manufacturer, or a farm-to-trade agriculture tech project, it helps us ensure that our view of an asset-centric supply chain respects the commonalities between all of these disparate industries enough to scale and grow in adoption successfully.”