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GS1 standards involved in serialization

With so many players in the supply chain poised to exchange data, it’s important that the industry coalesce around a common set of standards to ensure interoperability and scalability of integrations.

“For almost a decade, members of the pharmaceutical supply chain industry have been working together to enhance track-and-trace initiatives, address policy, and improve patient safety and security in the supply chain through the use of standards.  With the passage of H.R. 3204, these efforts have come to fruition in a national policy that will ensure a consistent, standardized approach is taken by the pharmaceutical industry to further combat counterfeiting, theft, and diversion, and to share critical information across the supply chain.

The federal law will replace a potential patchwork of 50 state regulations, which is critical for manufacturers, wholesalers, and dispensers as they can leverage their hard work that culminated in the publication of the industry guideline earlier this year (“Applying GS1 Standards to U.S. Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Business Processes to Support Serialization, Pedigree and Track & Trace”). GS1 Healthcare US and our industry partners are ready to further the collaboration to now align the guideline to comply at the federal level, along with supporting industry education and workshops.”
Bob Celeste, Senior Director, Pharmaceutical Sector Lead, GS1 US, [email protected]

Through GS1 standards, companies will have the ability to build solutions that have real value without having to go through a whole lot of data transformation, remapping, and reformatting. GS1 standards enable companies to drive out the uncertainty and cost associated with developing solutions.
At the end of the day, the goal is to make sure that the information everyone publishes across the supply chain is reliable and consumable by everyone else. The only way to accomplish that is to have a common set of standards to which everyone adheres.

What are GS1 standards?
First, it must be understood that GS1 is an international, nonprofit organization that publishes a system of supply chain standards, now in use by more than 2 million companies operating in 145 countries, designed to work together in concert.

GS1 standards are truly global and are applied across multiple industries, including the grocery supply chain and the general merchandise supply chain.  This is a bonus for pharmacies and wholesalers that participate in these supply chains.        

Here is a partial listing of GS1 standards that you may benefit from adopting if you haven’t already:

• GS1 GLN  Global Location Number
• GS1 GTIN Global Trade Item Number
• GS1 UPC barcode symbology
• GS1 element strings encoded in a barcode symbology such as GS1-128, GS1 DataMatrix, GS1 DataBar
• GS1 EANCOM EDI standard (Not used in the U.S. pharma supply chain)
• GS1 EPC RFID in frequencies including UHF and HF
• GS1 Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS)
• GS1 Drug Pedigree Messaging Standard (DPMS)
• GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN)

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