14.3% of Unapproved Medicines Enter US from India, says GS1

There’s much about this story I either don’t like or don’t trust. It’s inaccurate in part (it’s description of GS1 makes the organization sound as if it were founded to keep track of India). It’s an article with an agenda. While there’s nothing wrong with advocacy journalism, I still often prefer being given the straight [...]

Blogger Calls GS1 Databar a ‘Super Barcode’

Meet Erin Hodges. Proving that we all often end up doing things we didn’t start out to do, Ms. Hodges admits in her ‘About Me’ section of her blog, called barcode.com, the following: I recently graduated with a degree in Marketing, but I became interested in ADC after interning for a data capture technology company [...]

JAMA Article Shows RFID Labeling Causes “EMI Incidents”!

There are some enabling technologies that I guess even GS1 compliance can’t enable.
In another devastating blow to passive RFID adoption — and adopting RFID labeling has been touted heavily in the past by GS1 – none other than the Journal of the AMA (JAMA) came out with a study that shows RFID is hazardous to patient health. Hello? [...]

Pharmaceutical Packaging Market Size – How Much of That is GS1 Labels?

A little more on market and market sizes: the pharmaceutical packaging market will be $16B!  That’s USD $16,000,000,000.00
Christopher Piela (Loftware’s dedicated specialist on the healthcare vertical) found the size of the pharmaceutical packaging market (of which GS1-compliant labeling would definitely be an important part):

Worldwide Supply Chain Management Software Revenue Grows 18 Percent in 2007

I thought this bit of news was interesting in its own right and I’m sure GS1-compliant labels are in this category (among others) somewhere. (Also, you may recognize Mr Eschinger of Gartner from the quote he provided for the main page of the Loftware corporate website). It seems that worldwide supply chain management (SCM)  software revenue totaled [...]

GS1 Labeling & Companies With Multiple Business Units

The label is the proxy for the product and when a product is not labeled correctly, that’s not good. It’s also possible for you to label your product with a GS1-compliant label and . . . use the wrong one (yet use it the right way), often due to simple human error.  It’s a mistake — [...]

Inaugural GS1 GDSN Newsletter Features P&G, Coca-Cola, Best Buy, Wal-Mart…

Perhaps the best way to introduce you to the brand new GS1 GSDN Newsletter is to simply show you a part of the maiden issue’s Table of Contents for June 2008:

Oracle’s Position on GS1 Labeing and WMS Compliance Mandates in Labeling

Want to know more about where Oracle stands when it comes to labeling compliance issues and protocols? If so, you’ll enjoy a blog managed by Aditya Agarkar, Director of Product Strategy for Oracle WMS.

GS1 Completes Transport and Logistics Phase 2 Pilot Program

You’ll want to read about this news from GS1 if international supply chain efficiency, asset visibility and security initiatives are important to your business.  Here’s what the pilot program was all about:

So I asked my Kindle how many GS1 barcoded labels

would it take to send a can of paint from, say, a plant in Topeka, Kansas, USA, to every other country in the world?

Next GS1 US Healthcare Workgroup Forum Slated for July

GS1 US Healthcare posted information about the upcoming July workgroup forum to be held in San Antonio on July 23rd and 24th. It’s being held same place, same time as the important show AHRMM. Note that this is the premiere show for hospital materials management officers. You can see their entire info piece and register for [...]

GS1 Ireland CEO Jim Bracken Profiles Future of Healthcare

This article appearing awhile back in SiliconRepublic.com out of Dublin carries the author’s name – Jim Bracken — but doesn’t offer his background or affiliation. In fact, Jim Bracken, the author of this Viewpoint entitled, “Curing the patient,” is the CEO of GS1 Ireland. The only major tip-off to that is the very last sentence of Mr. Bracken’s long [...]

Throwing Tomatoes at the FDA

JUDY WOODRUFF: How much is known at this point about where this started? The FDA is saying they’re still investigating.
ELIZABETH WEISE: It’s a little unclear. At this time of — the epidemic started late April . . .
It’s the middle of June. Yet here’s the FDA: they don’t know when, they don’t know how, [...]

The Not-So-Silent Majority Ultimately Driving GS1 Labeling Adoption

Much time is spent here talking about the business benefits and supply chain efficiencies of global product identification and labeling standards through ‘the international language of business’ as promoted by GS1. I suppose that’s because businesses are motivated by self-interests such as their profit and loss statements, their margins, their market share. That’s all well and [...]

Hong Kong: A Micro Example of the Macro Opportunity

GS1 Hong Kong has announced that this coming October the organization will host its 8th Supply Chain Management Excellence Summit. You can read about it here. But you may be asking yourself, ‘Who cares?’ After all, the total population of Hong Kong is roughly only 7 million people. But that assumes you ignore that fact [...]

A Compelling View Why FDA-Regulated Pharmaceutical Labeling is Unique

Scott in design sent me this article  published just late last year. Entitled “Critical components of FDA-Regulated Pharmaceutical Labeling,” it features an interview with Ardi Batmanghelidj who has worked extensively in FDA-regulated environments for over 25 years and is currently president of a software development and IT consulting firm specializing in solutions and services for [...]

Speaking of Barcodes: Part 3 of 3 (the future)

In this somewhat long Part 3, we will be very far afield of GS1 labeling in healthcare. What we’ll be talking about is just now becoming visible on the barcode horizon. (Contrary to the media predictions, the future of the barcode is not RFID tagged labels. We’ll be examining a barcode future that has orders of magnitude more capacity [...]

Patient Safety Coalition Pressuring FDA to Finalize Device ID Rule: GS1 Labels?

This is an important news item for two reasons: First, patient safety advocates are growing impatient with the FDA for taking way too long to announce a proposed rule and concrete timeline for setting up a mandatory unique identification system for medical devices. Two, please note the mention in this article of the presumed standard: [...]

At Last, Some Well-Informed, Mainstream Reporting on GS1 Labeling

This is scary: writers with real readerships are beginning to focus seriously on GS1, GS1 labeling, healthcare and global standards. After years and years of quietly getting to this point without much fanfare, can GS1’s status as an overnight sensation be far behind? In this feature piece, iHealthBeat editor George Lauer presents a tremendous overview under [...]

Speaking of Barcodes: Part 2 of 3

The first major evolutionary step for the barcode as an information proxy was to encode info in more than just one “linear” direction and by and large these types of barcodes usually look like a little square of dots and dashes, rather than uniform-height hashmarks running left to right. They transform the encoding density of the barcode and are called 2D [...]