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Hospital logistics
The traceability is subject to the adoption of common standards:
The health sector thinks of the implementation of an internal system of traceability to meet with the requirement of traceability. For example and in particular, hospitals are constraied to justify the prescriptions to the patients near the social security in a data-processing way, under penalty of nonrefunding. With this intention, the adoption of common standards is an essential pre required .
All the reflexions started several years ago as regards hospital logistics have led to the same obviousness: there will be no total optimization and no total traceability without a identification system common to all the actors. Professionals of the Health sector turned to GS1 to think of a standardization of the procedures and means of identification.
“The trigger element , beyond the lawful aspects, occurred 2 years ago, at the Conference of the General managers of the CHU, during which was created a working group in order to implement the installation of an e-procurement platform intended for the rationalization of the procedures of purchases and to ensure the follow-up of the whole of the products from order to delivery, on the logistic platform. ” explains Valerie Marchand, Responsable for Projects within GS1.
This platform is a collaboratif portal which objectives are to be a common reference frame between the hospitals' suppliers and the CHU, to manage a whole of catalogues and to constitute a traceability data base making it possible to go beyond the expression of needs , by managing the reception of the goods until the validation of the invoice. However, only an international products' coding standards, in fact a GS1 standard , made it possible to ensure a good coherence of this product referenced frame.
The members of the platform thus retained GS1 standards for the identification of products, logistic units and places and services, Valerie Marchand says. The logistic units are thus codified with SSCC code so as to be able to integrate this information at the time of the reception and to follow these UL , like a delivery in units of intensive care for example. That makes it possible to know where the logistic unit was delivered and to allow an effective and fast withdrawal in the event of recall. ”
This portal makes it possible to ensure internal traceability of the provisioning request , the external follow-up of the order and internal and external traceabilities of the processes of reception and invoicing. Are found also, improvement steps for the processes of purchase and the logistic function undertaken by the hospitals.
An international step
The French hospital sector is not the only one to accelerate the optimization of its logistic processes and to promote the use of common standards throughout the chain in order to ensure a total traceability.
In Spain for example, the Ministries for Health of several
areas and many hospital complexes required of their suppliers to identify
the medical devices by means of GS1 standards in order to improve the
flow and inventory control in the establishments, thus facilitating the
traceability of the products and their restocking. Same thing in Great
Britain, where the agency of the purchases and provisioning of the National
Health Service invited the suppliers to use GS1 system for the identification
of the hospital provisioning.
“We also find this type of steps in Japan or in the United States,
Valerie Marchand explains. From now on, the use of these standards
is clearly allowed at the international level. The next stage relates
to the installation of these procedures and the deployment of these standards.
Certain countries are more advanced than others in this field. One can
think that within 3 years, France will have completed this phase. ”
According to : GS1 France