Archive for October, 2009

Right now there is only one industry standard that can be used to comply with the various drug pedigree laws in the United States. That’s the GS1 Drug Pedigree Messaging Standard (DPMS), which was created in 2006 by a group of technology experts and participants from nearly all segments of the U.S. supply chain culminating in GS1 ratification in January 2007. Many of those companies began using DPMS even before it was ratified because the Florida Pedigree Law went into effect in July 2006. Since then, companies are using it to comply with other state pedigree laws as well as for the pedigree provisions of the federal government’s Prescription Drug Marketing Act (PDMA) of 1988 (stayed until December 2006). Interestingly, a few companies have chosen to require DPMS pedigrees today for trading partner risk mitigation even where there is no existing regulatory requirement to do so.

A few months after GS1 ratified the DPMS standard, they ratified the Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) standard. This is a more general purpose standard intended for use in all supply chains that have a need to track and trace serialized products. Everyone acknowledges that it doesn’t make sense to try to use it for compliance with PDMA, Florida or other state pedigree laws because they do not require serialization, but in 2015 the California Pedigree Law will go into effect and one of its unique provisions requires item-level serialization.  Some see this as an ideal place to apply EPCIS.

There are lots of ways to contrast these two standards and their use for pedigree law compliance, but probably the most striking difference is how they each treat Supply Chain Master Data (SCMD). I defined SCMD in a previous post as “…that persistent, non-transactional data that defines a business entity for which there is, or should be, an agreed upon view across the supply chain.”

GLN as SCMD

Addresses are an example of a “business entity” that can be treated as SCMD. GS1 defines a location identifier they call a Global Location Number (GLN) that can be used to refer to an address. A GLN is a structured series of digits that can be assigned to refer to a single address (among other things). Refer to the GS1 General Specification for the details. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year The Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM) and the Center for Innovation in Healthcare Logistics (CIHL) at the University of Arkansas published the results of a survey they conducted in 2008 titled “The State of Healthcare Logistics”. The survey polled 1381 healthcare supply chain professionals regarding their “perceptions of cost and quality efficiencies and improvement opportunities within their organization”. I’m always a little skeptical (alright, I’m a lot skeptical) of “perception surveys”, but since this one was focused on the specific supply chain that I’m a member of, I took some interest. This survey included a series of questions about the respondent’s perception of Data Standards, which really caught my eye.

In fact, I’ve been doing a little investigating myself into the competing standards that are related to supply chain master data. My career experience in this area has almost solely dealt with GS1 standards, but that may be because the healthcare part of my career has centered on the pharmaceutical distribution corner of the full healthcare supply chain. If it had been centered on the distribution of medical devices, I would have been much more familiar with HIBCC (Healthcare Industry Business Communications Council) supply chain data standards. I’ve been trying to figure out if the industry needs multiple competing data standards and, if not, which one is a better set: GS1 or HIBCC? And should I consider some other set of standards that I just don’t know about? Are there good reasons to continue the use of either or both sets of standards in our supply chain?

In this light, I turned my attention to the AHRMM/CIHL survey results, hoping to gain some valuable insight. I quickly got stuck on their very first survey question in the Data Standards section (on page 15 of their report):

A. Is your organization moving towards the adoption of a data standards system (such as GS1) in the next five years?

Now this is an amazingly bad survey question that wouldn’t even pass a “survey questions 101” class. It is a classic example of a leading question. One where the desired answer is provided directly in the question itself. But look at the choice of answers!

1. Yes – GS1
2. Yes – Other
3. No
4. Don’t Know

Read the rest of this entry »