When either the California ePedigree law or the federal law go into full effect, how smooth will that rollout be? While there are big differences between those implementations and the deployment of Healthcare.gov, the U.S. federal government’s new health insurance exchange website that is part of the Patient Protection and Healthcare Affordable Care Act (often referred to as the ACA, or “Obamacare”), I think the troubles it is experiencing may be an example of how the ePedigree system will work on initial rollout. That’s right, I’m predicting a nightmare, especially if it’s the California law that rolls out. Continue reading How Smooth Will Industry Deployment of the ePedigree Laws Be? Take a Good Look At Healthcare.gov
Tag Archives: GS1 U.S.
Hey California Board of Pharmacy: Your Time Is Running Out!
The California Board of Pharmacy has begun to hold ePedigree-specific meetings with staff and a subset of the Board present. The first of these occurred on Monday of this week. The agenda was fairly long and promised action on a number of important topics, including the possibility that the Board would consider the use of EPCIS as a pedigree platform, inference, pedigree certifications and drop shipments. I came away disappointed that the only thing that happened was a brief discussion of each topic but seemingly no real action. It was almost as if the Board members and staff had made no progress on any of these topics since the March Enforcement Committee meeting. All that seemed to happen since that meeting Continue reading Hey California Board of Pharmacy: Your Time Is Running Out!
Would A U.S. Federal Pedigree Law Require A New UFA?
One of the questions that must be answered is, “how will an ePedigree and track & trace system be funded?”. Who pays, who gets paid, and how much? The answer to these questions are partly determined by which technology model is in use. One reason a distributed model is usually the first model people think of is that the funding is so obvious: it is localized. In that model each company would arrange for their own services. No pooling is needed. That’s simple to understand and quantify because everyone is in control of the services they need.
But because distributed models have so many points of failure—any one of which would Continue reading Would A U.S. Federal Pedigree Law Require A New UFA?
Draft Regulations On Certifications Within California ePedigrees
During the March 14, 2013 meeting of the Enforcement Committee of the California Board of Pharmacy, Joshua Room, Supervising Deputy Attorney General at California Department of Justice assigned to the California Board of Pharmacy distributed copies of draft text that he is looking for public comments on. The draft is for regulations covering pedigree “certification”, the use of “inference” and “inspection” of electronic pedigrees. Unfortunately the text is Continue reading Draft Regulations On Certifications Within California ePedigrees
The Board of Pharmacy Must Respond To Ideas For Making EPCIS Work
There was a particularly interesting public dialog that occurred during the March 14, 2013 meeting of the Enforcement Committee of the California Board of Pharmacy. I have been waiting for the official video recording of the meeting to be posted by the State of California but something seems to be holding it up. Fortunately, I recorded the audio myself.
UPDATE: Apparently the video has been out there for almost 3 weeks. I was looking for it in the wrong place. Find it here.
The dialog was between Joshua Room, Supervising Deputy Attorney General at California Department of Justice assigned to the California Board of Pharmacy, and Bob Celeste, Director, GS1 Healthcare US. Mr. Celeste had just finished presenting an update to the Committee on the recently published GS1 US Guideline (see “The New GS1 Healthcare US Track & Trace Guidance”) when Mr. Room asked him to remain at the front of the room to serve as a foil for an experiment he wanted to try. Mr. Room had
Continue reading The Board of Pharmacy Must Respond To Ideas For Making EPCIS Work
California ePedigree Uncertainty
A lot of things related to ePedigree in the U.S. supply chain are cooking right now but they seem to be happening a little too slowly, so it will be interesting to see where it all ends up in the next few years. After developing the Drug Pedigree Messaging Standard (DPMS) in 2006-2007, GS1 is now taking only the initial steps toward adding network-centric ePedigree capabilities to their EPCIS and related standards. The California Board of Pharmacy says they would like to be able to accept a semi-centralized network centric approach as long as it includes all the stuff listed in their pedigree law. For nearly 18 months, GS1 U.S. has been “nearing publication” of a draft guideline—six years in the making—that is supposed to help companies who want to use EPCIS to meet the California law. Congress considered passing a Federal track & trace regulation that would have preempted the California law last year but failed from lack of agreement between the parties. Some companies are making good progress on meeting the serialization requirement but the number who have the pedigree part figured out are those who have settled on DPMS. All the while the California pedigree deadlines are rushing toward us like a bus-sized asteroid heading straight toward Earth. Not surprisingly, the asteroid is moving faster than the efforts to divert or absorb it.
I’ve written about my theory that the date of impact won’t be pushed out again, no matter what happens (for a full explanation of that theory, see “Will The California ePedigree Dates Slip Again?”).
What can be done? In my view, it’s going to be determined by Continue reading California ePedigree Uncertainty
“The Shadows Of Things That MAY BE, Only” : EPCIS and California Compliance
Currently, we know that companies can use GS1’s Drug Pedigree Messaging Standard (DPMS) to comply with the California pedigree law. That’s been known for a long time now. But many companies have been hoping to use GS1’s more general purpose Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) standard instead for almost as long. For just as long, it has been known that a number of problems arise when you try to figure out exactly how to apply EPCIS to California compliance.
The problem is, EPCIS was originally envisioned by its creators to share supply chain “visibility” data. That is, event data that was to be collected automatically based on Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) reads picked up by readers that were to be spread around the supply chain by each of its members. The collection of RFID readers were to form a kind of “visibility” of each RFID tag applied to the products in the supply chain. From this visibility would come benefits. One of those benefits was to be Continue reading “The Shadows Of Things That MAY BE, Only” : EPCIS and California Compliance
How To Maximize The ROI Of Attending A Conference
I’ve been doing a lot of traveling in the last few months since I left Cardinal Health. Right now my wife and I are just finishing up a visit to Culver City, CA where we arrived just in time for the birth of our first grandchild. This was a non-business trip, of course, but all of my other recent travels have been to attend conferences or public meetings of one kind or another.
One of the ways I maximize the return on investment (ROI) of attending conferences is to take lots of notes and then publish internally an analysis of the things that I thought had some important significance to my company. This technique has resulted in a searchable record of my impressions of every speaker and networking contact that struck me for any reason in almost every Continue reading How To Maximize The ROI Of Attending A Conference
