This is to bring to your attention a GSMP (Global Standard Management Process) Community announcement on the SA2 Worldsync blog about a GS1 Healthcare Blood Derivatives Work Group call to action. It is a collaborative effort to fix a specific problem we know from first-hand experience is often a disaster in the making: re-labeling. It’s a big problem even for, let’s say, a manufacturer of wrenches. But when it comes to blood and plasma derivatives… well it shouldn’t happen. But it does and here is how the problem is described on the blog:
Plasma derivatives are currently in a kind of “grey zone”, some of the suppliers identifying them with GS1 keys and attributes, some identifying them with ISBT 128 keys and attributes, some providing no AIDC solution at all. To compensate variety of AIDC solution on the products, many users have to re-label – which is a possible source of errors and considered as inefficient. This situation is not only inefficient but put patients at increased risks.
That an across the board product identification standard has not yet been universally adopted amazes me. It’ is the rough equivalent in my mind of a world in which no one ever invented, nor adopted, standard weights and measures. Buying blood without a universally applied and understood identification standard is akin to buying things like ice cream by the fistful or hot dogs by the finger length which obviously would vary worldwide. Bottom line, you’d never know exactly what you were getting. To state the obvious, in healthcare, that’s very bad.
Filed under: Bar code, C-Level Issues, FDA related, GS1, GS1 Adoption, Hospital, Patient safety, Track & Trace
