It was also being looked after by medical personnel who did not have training in the management of logistics processes.

Working with GS1 Costa Rica, the National Children’s hospital implemented GS1 standards and better logistical practices to bring innovation to their way of managing medical supplies and to initiate the automation of processes.

But to do so efficiently, they should be based on global standards rather than a proprietary system, and the captured data should be integrated into national health information systems to achieve end-to-end data visibility.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) DELIVER PROJECT work together to strengthen public health commodity supply chains by standardizing bar coding under a single set of global standards. From 2015, UNFPA and USAID collaborated to pilot test how tracking and tracing of bar coded health products could be operationalized in the public health supply chains of Ethiopia and Pakistan and inform the ecosystem needed to begin full implementation.

And, as its cross-functional team demonstrates, collaboration is the mortar that is enabling its steady digital transformation to address challenges from compliance to care to cost containment.

As a result, Mercy has increased its operational efficiency and productivity while continuing to focus on improved patient safety and outcomes. Case in point: Charge capture in its highest cost area—surgery—has improved by 28-30 percent. This has resulted in more than a $340 charge capture per procedure and the documentation of tens of millions of charges not previously captured.

The company’s focus is R&D, and the manufacturing and marketing of innovative medical devices.

Mediplus needed to publish its medical devices’ unique device identifiers (UDIs) to the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Global UDI Database (GUDID), but wanted a scalable solution to meet the company’s other demands on its product data. Mediplus decided to leverage the GS1 Global Data Synchronisation Network® (GDSN®) to communicate its product master data to trading partners, and selected LANSA’s SyncManager multi-domain MDM platform, as its integration solution. Mediplus now spends less time managing product data and learning different rules and formats. The solution’s audit features also provide Mediplus with full data governance.

This manual process made it difficult to monitor the usage histories of all devices.

A medical device management system was developed using barcode scanning. All medical devices were scanned every time they were taken out or returned to the store room, as well as when they were used at an operation venue. By linking all the scanned data, the use and maintenance histories of over 1,000 devices in the hospital are captured and verified in real time.

Today, hospital management needs to know exactly how much a treatment or a disease costs the hospital in order to effectively manage its budget.

There is a need for a new paradigm shift in healthcare where healthcare providers measure revenues and expenditures similar to profit-oriented businesses. With new technologies and standardised solutions, they can optimise their processes and make them costeffective. With data recorded precisely at locations where patient treatments take place, hospitals can improve patient safety, reducing time spent on the administration of IT systems.

Lovisenberg Diaconal Hospital in Norway needed to streamline its processes associated with the handling of surgical equipment.

Highly trained surgical staff was spending valuable time on manual tasks like sorting, packaging and the replenishment of equipment used in surgical procedures.

Staff in the Surgical and Sterile department collaborated with GS1 Norway and APX Systems to develop and implement a traceability solution based on GS1 standards. The system has automated the department’s surgical, ordering, replenishment and recall processes for impressive improvements.

Drivers for these efforts include the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Unique Device Identification (UDI) regulation.

Since 2015, LM-Dental has applied EPC-enabled RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology and GS1 identifiers to its dental hand instruments. LM-Dental’s customers (e.g., hospitals, universities and dental clinics) can now partner with them to track dental instruments with an automated traceability system—the LM-Dental Tracking System™ (DTS), using GS1 standards. Instruments are tracked from the time they are dispensed through to utilisation, processing, sterilisation and return to storage.

The Universtity of Copenhagen’s School of Oral Health Care is one such hospital that has leveraged LM-Dental’s use of GS1 standards to make continuous improvements in its daily operations and long-term planning for increased patient safety. With GS1 standards, the school’s staff has greater control over the infection control status and stock levels of all instruments, reducing inventory costs by approximately 10 percent.

It has developed a project of Unique Device Identification (UDI) for surgical instruments and clinical services instruments. Over three years they will identify 10,000 operating theatre instruments using laser DataMatrix 2D barcodes, as well as 12,000 clinical services instruments.

The initial results, using laser technology to identify small instruments, were very promising. However, the project highlighted the necessity for regulation of the UDI. For this project EAN 128 codes were chosen, but other hospitals in France chose to use their own code. A regulation of the use of UDI would provide clarity and avoid a situation where every hospital develops its own UDI.

An extensive international audit has shown that the hospital has a unique GS1 barcode on each medical device in the operating room (OR).

The result is complete traceability, from the time a product enters the hospital to the point of use, thus improving patient safety and supply chain efficiency. All of this is accomplished via the support and cooperation of all stakeholders throughout the chain within the hospital, from management to purchasing, finance and IT departments.