GS1 Healthcare and ICCBBA join forces to advance global standards to improve patient safety
Global News
4 September 2007
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Two complementary global standards organisations will collaborate to advance global automatic identification standards in Healthcare to reduce medical errors, enable global traceability, and to increase the effectiveness of the healthcare supply chain.
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM and REDLANDS, CA, USA September 4, 2007 – ICCBBA and GS1 Healthcare have announced today they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate in the area of automatic identification standards for Healthcare.
ICCBBA and GS1 acknowledge their respective roles in Healthcare standards and will work together to ensure compatibility between their standards. They will also collaborate to promote the adoption and implementation of automatic identification standards in Healthcare around the world.
GS1 Healthcare aims to adapt GS1’s existing global standards to the specific needs of the healthcare sector, in particular for the identification of pharmaceutical products, medical devices, patients, caregivers, locations and assets. GS1’s global standards for automatic identification (through barcodes and radio frequency identification) provide the opportunity to make the healthcare supply chain more efficient and accurate, and thus safer. Medication errors can be avoided by automatically matching product data to patient data. These standards also enable effective traceability and reduce counterfeiting.
“GS1 is committed to the healthcare sector to facilitate the development and adoption of global Automatic Identification standards around the world, first and foremost to improve patient safety”. Michel van der Heijden, President Healthcare, GS1, “ICCBBA is well established in its field of expertise and we are convinced that the collaboration with ICCBBA will enable the blood transfusion community, including hospitals, to be seamlessly interoperable with the GS1 System of Standards.”
ICCBBA manages the well established ISBT 128 Information Standard widely used for the coding of human blood, cellular therapy and tissue products. ISBT 128 improves safety and supports traceability around the world by providing a globally unique identifier for transfusion and transplantation products, and a coding system for these products based on internationally agreed reference tables.
“The case for global standards in transfusion and transplantation is now widely accepted and we are seeing an unprecedented growth in the use of ISBT 128.” Paul Ashford, Executive Director of ICCBBA, “We welcome the development of GS1 standards for healthcare, and we look forward to the benefits that our collaboration can deliver within this crucial area of the healthcare community”
