ID standards in healthcare
How identification standards can enable an electronic health record.
Risks to patient safety occur when there is a mismatch between a given patient and components of their care, whether these elements are diagnostic, therapeutic or supportive. Throughout healthcare, the failure to correctly identify patients and match that information to an intended clinical intervention continues to result in wrong person, wrong site procedures, medication errors, transfusion errors and diagnostic testing errors.
When looking at how technology can improve patient safety, we don’t need to look very far. The retail sector has demonstrated the value of adopting GS1 standard barcoding, which has reshaped these industries and created billions of dollars in value.
McKinsey & Co research states: “Using global product identification to match patients with drugs, for example, could help hospitals reduce the number and severity of adverse drug events, which, according to our research, now stand at more than 25 million with over 100,000 deaths annually.” (Strength in unity: The promise of global standards in healthcare, October 2012). Therefore preventing medical errors, enabling traceability and recall and combating counterfeiting are key issues facing the healthcare sector, and GS1 standards are helping to solve them.
New regulations on traceability of medical devices and pharmaceuticals in the EU, the US and elsewhere are having a major, direct and positive impact on the healthcare supply chain. The regulations are driving a harmonised standard for identification in healthcare. Using global standards facilitates widespread interoperability among healthcare software applications and technologies. The barcode scan of a unique identifier becomes the key to access information in the clinical system about a patient, product or service. The case study described next illustrates this point.
The HSE has implemented a new tracking system for re-usable medical instrument sets (trays) and endoscopes in twenty hospitals and this solution is currently being rolled out to the remaining Irish hospitals. Instrument sets contain all the instruments required for a specific surgical procedure. Sharing re-usable instrument sets between hospitals has cost-saving and availability benefits. However, when an instrument set is loaned to another hospital, the history of the set is often lost and the set needs to be registered again. This is a paper-based and labour-intensive process.
Using the GS1 Individual Asset Identifier in barcode format uniquely identifies each instrument set and allows the set to be linked to a patient in theatre. As the set passes through the hospital decontamination unit every step is electronically recorded, time-stamped and linked to the set by scanning the barcode. When sets move between hospitals, each receiving hospital scans the barcode which enables the details from the previous location to be imported. This maintains the identification integrity of the individual set and its contents as well as its documentation. The automation of the process ensures safety and saves time.
At the recent GS1 Global Healthcare Conference in Mexico, the HSE received the Healthcare Provider Advisory Council (HPAC) award for this excellent implementation which demonstrates true interoperability using globally unique identification standards.
GS1 is an international, neutral and not-for-profit organisation with operations in more than 110 countries around the world, including Ireland. GS1 standards are the most widely-used system of supply chain standards, serving more than 2 million organisations (both public and private sector) worldwide.
For more information, please contact:
– Mike Byrne, CEO
– Siobhain Duggan
Director of Innovation and Healthcare
GS1 Ireland
Tel: 01 208 0660
Web: www.gs1ie.org/healthcare
