Posts Tagged ‘HIBCC’

That’s right.  GS1 and HIBCC are in a multi-year fight over the dominance of their standards within the U.S. healthcare supply chain. Read the rest of this entry »

In April of last year VHA, a nationwide network of community-owned health care systems, published a viewpoint essay on their website called “The Track to Improving Health Care will be Built with IT Standards”.  The posting was written by Mike Cummins, Chief Information Officer of VHA, Inc.  In it, he draws a great analogy between the widespread adoption of a standard railroad gauge by railroad companies 150 years ago as part of the U.S. Transcontinental Railway (as set in motion by President Abraham Lincoln), and the potential benefits of widespread adoption of health care IT standards.  Mike points out that some historians believe that the nationwide adoption of a single railway gauge accelerated the evolution of the greatness of the United States.  It’s well worth reading.

I think the problem Mike sees is that there are so many incompatible IT standards in use in the healthcare industry, with different ones in use in different pockets of the industry.  There are too many proprietary approaches in use, and too many standards in use in one segment of the industry that are incompatible with similar standards in use in another.  In effect, it’s a patchwork, yet each user can claim to be using a standard.  This was exactly the case with the railroads 150 years ago as Mike’s analogy implies.  Each railroad company, or groups of companies, had their favorite “standard” gauge, but which standard was “the best”…the one worthy of becoming the national standard?  I don’t know, but I do know they eventually figured it out and settled on a single gauge for the Transcontinental Railroad and that gauge become the defacto standard.  That allowed the country to be connected and, as Mike points out, historians have dawn a direct line from that agreement to economic expansion and eventual greatness.

Mike makes several proposals that I interpret as ways to cut through the patchwork of standards and get the industry to settle, like the railroad companies, on a single standard for some key technologies like Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Health Identification Numbers and Personal Health Records (PHR).  He calls for the broad, mandatory adoption of GS1barcodes, Global Location Numbers (GLN), Global Trade Item Numbers (GTIN) and accelerated plans by the FDA to mandate the usage of Unique Device Identification (UDI).  He calls for the use of part of the federal economic stimulus money to be used for standards development.  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 »