Safer, more efficient care starts with a simple scan. 

The opportunity of Unique Device Identification

With patient safety as the driver, medical device manufacturers are required to implement Unique Device Identification (UDI) to mark and identify their products due to the Medical Device Regulation (MDR).

Furthermore, the Falsified Medicines Directive requires prescription pharmaceutical products in the EU to be identified and authenticated using a GS1 2D DataMatrix Barcode.

The International Medical Device Regulator Forum (IMDRF), the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Commission (EC) are aiming to optimise patient care by proposing a globally harmonised and consistent approach to identification through legislation and global standards. Industry is working with GS1 to achieve compliance.

With regulations for the standardised identification of medical devices and pharmaceuticals in place, there is a real opportunity now to standardise and design-in traceability standards in our healthcare systems.

Safer systems: Designing-in traceability standards

As healthcare systems and processes are being digitised, it is key that data standards are ‘designed-in’ from the start. At its heart GS1 is about unique identification, encoding barcodes with structured, standardised data and using this to enable traceability. These three ingredients are fundamental to designing ehealth solutions that are safe, future proofed, and interoperable.

When unique identifiers and structured data are in use then it is much easier to link systems as there are common data fields in both systems.

For example, a clinician scans a patient barcode: when standards are used the system will recognise 'I am a patient' and add the patient identifier into the correct field in the system. This ensures that the data is captured accurately and there is no risk that a staff (or other) identifier is put into a patient field or vice versa.

Real-time, accurate, meaningful data

Systems with traceability standards ‘designed-in’ have much better data quality as the barcode scan captures all the data real-time at multiple stages.  A barcode scan is much more reliable; data entry errors can cause unintended consequences when later interrogating data.

For example, when trying to identify a recalled batch – BKO123 – does the human eye see this as a zero or the letter O if manually capturing the data?

Removing paper-based systems and manual processes and using ‘a simple scan’ of GS1 standard barcodes to cross check and capture patient data reduces; the risk of medical error; the time to carry out administrative tasks; and returns time to front line staff to concentrate on patient care.

Safer, more efficient care starts with a simple scan

Healthcare providers are now seeing these benefits through the implementation of Scan4Safety or point-of-care scanning to enhance traceability. Meaning, once you scan the barcode of a product given to a patient, you have complete traceability.

Hospitals need to know what is happening to make informed decisions. If they can monitor activity in real time with Scan4Safety, they can quickly react to any issue. For instance, clinical staff at Tallaght University Hospital (TUH) were spending a large proportion of their time per week managing inventory.

This was taking valuable clinical time away from patient care, and they found that they had little visibility into what item was used and with what patient. This posed a significant risk to patient safety.

Scan4Safety has now been rolled out to all theatres in TUH, which is both saving significant clinical time and enabling safer care for patients. The clinicians now have the information they need at the touch of a button. 

The opportunities for traceability extend across the hospital in both clinical and non-clinical areas, including catering and asset management, as well as in community healthcare, such as chronic disease management.

At its core is patient safety and making sure the right product gets to the right patient at the right time. Moreover, it offers transparency and enables sustainability by reducing waste of medical materials as staff can easily keep track of them.

It is really important that this operating model is adopted across our health system to ensure the foundations are laid for digital transformation and thus ensuring safer, more efficent care.

For more information contact: Siobhain Duggan, director of innovation and healthcare GS1 Ireland. healthcare@gs1ie.org and www.gs1ie.org/healthcare