Two complementary global standards organizations will collaborate to advance global automatic identification standards in Healthcare to reduce medical errors, enable global traceability, and to increase the effectiveness of the healthcare supply chain.

Contact:          
- Paul Ashford, Executive Director, ICCBBA.
- Jan Denecker, Marketing Manager Healthcare, GS1 Global Office.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM and REDLANDS, CA, USA September 4, 2007 – ICCBBA and GS1 Healthcare have announced today they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate in the area of automatic identification standards for Healthcare.

ICCBBA and GS1 acknowledge their respective roles in Healthcare standards and will work together to ensure compatibility between their standards. They will also collaborate to promote the adoption and implementation of automatic identification standards in Healthcare around the world.  

GS1 Healthcare aims to adapt GS1’s existing global standards to the specific needs of the healthcare sector, in particular for the identification of pharmaceutical products, medical devices, patients, caregivers, locations and assets. GS1’s global standards for automatic identification (through bar codes and radio frequency identification) provide the opportunity to make the healthcare supply chain more efficient and accurate, and thus safer. Medication errors can be avoided by automatically matching product data to patient data. These standards also enable effective traceability and reduce counterfeiting.

“GS1 is committed to the healthcare sector to facilitate the development and adoption of global Automatic Identification standards around the world, first and foremost to improve patient safety”. Michel van der Heijden, President Healthcare, GS1, “ICCBBA is well established in its field of expertise and we are convinced that the collaboration with ICCBBA will enable the blood transfusion community, including hospitals, to be seamlessly interoperable with the GS1 System of Standards.”

ICCBBA manages the well established ISBT 128 Information Standard widely used for the coding of human blood, cellular therapy and tissue products. ISBT 128 improves safety and supports traceability around the world by providing a globally unique identifier for transfusion and transplantation products, and a coding system for these products based on internationally agreed reference tables.
“The case for global standards in transfusion and transplantation is now widely accepted and we are seeing an unprecedented growth in the use of ISBT 128.” Paul Ashford, Executive Director of ICCBBA, “We welcome the development of GS1 standards for healthcare, and we look forward to the benefits that our collaboration can deliver within this crucial area of the healthcare community”

About ICCBBA
ICCBBA is a not-for-profit information standards body committed to enhancing safety for patients through standardisation. ICCBBA was established in 1995 by the International Society for Blood Transfusion in order to manage ISBT 128, a new global information standard for blood transfusion. In 2000 the scope of the ISBT 128 standard was extended to include cellular therapy and tissue transplantation products.

ISBT 128 provides a globally unique donation identification number, internationally agreed product codes, and a range of data structures for encoding critical specialist information.

ICCBBA has its Head Office in Redlands, CA, USA. The Board of Directors comprises experts in the fields of transfusion and transplantation from around the world. ICCBBA supports a network of international technical advisory groups that ensure the ongoing development of the standard to meet the needs of these rapidly advancing fields.

About GS1
GS1 is a neutral, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the design and implementation of global standards and solutions to improve the efficiency and visibility in supply chains. GS1 is driven by more than a million companies, who execute more than five billion transactions a day with the GS1 System of Standards. This makes it the most widely used supply chain standards system in the world. GS1’s diversified portfolio ranges from GS1 Bar Codes to GS1 eCom (electronic commerce tools) to next generation technologies and solutions such as GS1 GDSN (Data Synchronisation), EPCglobal (using RFID technologies) and traceability. GS1 is truly global, with local Member Organisations in 108 countries, and with Global Offices in Brussels, Belgium and Princeton, USA.

GS1 Healthcare has been primarily focused since 2005 to develop global standards for automatic identification in Healthcare. GS1 Healthcare consists of participants from all stakeholders of the Healthcare supply chain: manufacturers, wholesalers & distributors, as well as hospitals and pharmacy retailers. GS1 Healthcare also maintains close contacts with regulatory agencies and trade organizations worldwide.

For more information contact:

Lisa Henshaw or Kirsty Sewter
Fourth Day PR
+44 (0)20 7403 4411

Suraya Adnan-Ariffin
GS1 UK
+44 (0)20 70923575

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