Health and care services

Safer more efficient care

(L to R): Siobhain Duggan GS1, John Swords HSE, Pat Tracey DCC Vital, Michael Kelly GS1, Chris Tulloch North Tees, Richard Corbridge HSE, Joan Cahill Pfizer, Nicola Hickie HPRA, Siobhan Dunphy HSE, Mike Byrne GS1.
(L to R): Siobhain Duggan GS1, John Swords HSE, Pat Tracey DCC Vital, Michael Kelly GS1, Chris Tulloch North Tees, Richard Corbridge HSE, Joan Cahill Pfizer, Nicola Hickie HPRA, Siobhan Dunphy HSE, Mike Byrne GS1.

Safer more efficient care starts with a simple scan – report on recent GS1 event.

On Friday 4th November the GS1 Ireland Healthcare User Group hosted a breakfast briefing in the Boardroom of the HSE, Dr Steevens.
The event was very well attended by over 80 senior leaders from Irish healthcare representing suppliers, HSE and hospitals. The agenda for the morning was to create awareness about the patient safety and efficiency benefits of barcoding for Irish healthcare and to get support from the audience for the full adoption of GS1 standards.

Michael Kelly, who chaired the event, outlined the opportunity for Ireland to leverage learnings from best practice both in Ireland and internationally. He pointed to the benefits of uniquely identifying patient, provider, product, place and procedure, enabling the capture of information and outcomes-based analytics. With work underway on the single financial management system, the timing is right to ‘design in’ GS1 standards from the start for a ‘joined-up system’ approach.

Richard Corbridge, CIO for the HSE, endorsed the requirement for a standards-based approach for Unique Identification saying, “we can’t deliver without GS1 and data standards; we need to be able to uniquely identify all parts of the care journey”. He continued by outlining plans for the launch of the Individual Health Identifier (IHI) which will be based on the GS1 identifier for patients.

The NHS is now mandating the use of GS1 standards for all Trusts and suppliers, starting with identifying the patient, product and location. This work is underway in the six demonstrator sites. Guest speaker Chris Tulloch, Associate Medical Director and consultant orthopaedic surgeon of North Tees and Hartlepool Hospitals NHS Trust (also a demonstrator site), spoke about ‘GS1 standards improving clinical effectiveness and patient safety’. Chris spoke about how he had his ‘eureka moment’ when realising that the efficiencies gained by the scanning of products in Retail (e.g. Supermarkets) is equally as applicable in the provision of healthcare services. Chris is passionate about patient care and he is convinced that GS1 standards can make a real difference for inventory management and ultimately patient safety. Colm Henry, National Clinical Advisor Acute Hospitals, HSE spoke next about the challenges that currently exist in Irish healthcare. Colm recognised that barcoding and innovation can enable accurate administration of patient care and can save lives.

John Swords outlined how procurement is building on existing successful implementations of track and trace in Irish healthcare to use the GS1 Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), which is already on 80 per cent of medical products, as the single identifier supporting a single system and one voice for health.

Pat Tracey, Group Operations Director, DCC Vital, compared the ‘opportunity versus cost’ of implementing GS1 standards. He commented that implementation will require some investment, but it will also realise significant benefits and opportunities for suppliers big and small. He added that the opportunity of efficiency gains in supply chains [and patient safety] is part of the cost recovery, which is why it is so critical for the HSE to mandate this for all suppliers.

The session concluded with a brief regulatory update. Both pharmaceuticals and medical devices will be required to have a unique identifier in the form of a barcode by 2019/2020 respectively. There will be an information day on these regulations in early 2017.

The concluding comments confirmed this is an opportunity for the HSE, hospitals and suppliers to address some of the low hanging fruit which will take cost out of the system, give time back to patient care and improve visibility of what is happening the patient for improved patient safety.

Background

GS1 licences the most widely-used system of supply chain standards, serving more than 2 million public and private sector organisations worldwide.
For more information, please contact:

Mike Byrne, Chief Executive Officer


Siobhain Duggan, Director of 
Innovation and Healthcare


GS1 Ireland


Tel: 01 208 0660


Web: www.gs1ie.org/healthcare

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