According to a McKinsey & Company report, the implementation of global standards throughout the healthcare system could save tens of thousands of lives and prevent about 1 million patient disabilities. Also, a single system of global standards can:
* Keep counterfeit drugs worth billions of dollars from infiltrating supply chains.
* Allow safety improvements that can cut $40-100 billion in healthcare costs.
* Cost much less than having multiple systems of global standards.
Already over 50 healthcare organisations from around the world have shown their support for the GS1 System of Standards for Healthcare.
At GS1’s Healthcare Conference in October in San Francisco, GS1 and HL7 (the global authority on standards for interoperability of health information technology) took a significant step to improving global healthcare by renewing their Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Miguel Lopera (GS1’s President and CEO) and Dr. Charles Jaffe (HL7’s CEO) signed an agreement to allow the two organisations to continue working together and achieve a reduction in medical errors and an improvement in the healthcare supply chain’s effectiveness.
Lopera said that GS1 is happy to work with HL7 to improve patient safety by combining GS1’s global standards for the healthcare supply chain with HL7’s international standards for the interoperability of healthcare information. Jaffe added that integrating both standards and using them in exchanging, storing and retrieving healthcare data will help to further lower healthcare costs.
Bizcaps is an alliance partner of GS1 and our Bizcaps DataSync and Bizcaps Enterprise product data management software simplifies the publishing of product information to GDSN-compliant datapools such as the NPC (National Product Catalogue) in Australia and the DHBNC in NZ.