The need for standardization
Today, healthcare trading partners, their locations and the products they use or manufacture are identified differently within their own organizations and in their business transactions with one another. These inconsistencies increase errors, labor and costs throughout the supply chain and jeopardize patient safety.
To address these issues, the healthcare industry is increasingly turning to global data standards to help every party within the supply chain use the same unique identifiers for organizations (providers and suppliers), locations (billing and shipping) and healthcare products down to the lowest unit of measure.
Benefits
- Improved accuracy and efficiency in the purchasing process
- Increased contract compliance and optimization
- Improved inventory and logistics management
- More accurate business partner transactions, including group purchasing organization (GPO) reporting and distributor chargebacks/rebates
- Ability to identify and track products from the point of manufacture to the point of use for better recall management and improved patient safety
Drivers of standards adoption
A variety of factors have converged to make global data standardization a priority in the healthcare industry:
- The urgent need to address increasing margin pressures and declining revenues on both the buy and sell side of the healthcare supply chain through improved process efficiency, more accurate transactions and greater visibility to data
- The desire for healthcare trading partners to automate business processes, which requires data standardization and synchronization
- Major U.S. healthcare systems and GPOs calling on trading partners to use GS1 standard location and product identifiers in business transactions
- Multiple markets across the globe requiring the use of GS1 standards
- Regulatory initiatives such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Unique Device Identifier (UDI) system, e-Pedigree and track and trace
