Transforming the Healthcare Supply Chain
Healthcare systems around the globe are facing challenges that affect the entire supply chain, from manufacturers through to wholesalers, distributors, group purchasing organisations and healthcare providers. Everyone is concerned primarily with two main issues: increasing supply chain efficiency and more importantly, ensuring patient safety.
The regulatory landscape continues to evolve; new regulations will have a direct impact on the Healthcare supply chain, requiring stakeholders to implement automatic identification technologies, electronic product catalogues, serialisation (a unique serial number on each package or product, where appropriate) and/or traceability systems.
Supply chain data standards can provide a global framework for all stakeholders to comply with regulatory and tender requirements and to meet the challenges of today’s complex Healthcare supply chain.
The GS1 System of Standards provides a global harmonised and integrated framework to manage supply chain information.
Concerns about patient safety and rapidly escalating Healthcare costs have called for authorities and all stakeholders to take action to address important challenges:
- Reducing medical errors
- Enabling eff ective product recalls, adverse event reporting and post market surveillance
- Increasing supply chain security and fi ghting counterfeiting
- Facilitating treatment documentation in Electronic Health Records/Electronic Medical Records (EHR/EMR)
- Optimising production and packaging processes in a global environment
- Optimising supply chain management, including logistics, procurement, stock and asset management processes
Notable example of regulatory developments worldwide include:
- Unique Device Identification (UDI) & traceability: US FDA, Global Harmonization Taskforce (GHTF), European Commission, China SFDA…
- Serialised pharmaceutical product identifi er & traceability: US FDA, Turkey, Brazil, California…
- GS1 DataMatrix: France, Korea, Turkey…
- Electronic product catalogues: Australia, NHS (UK), Turkey…
