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If you are looking for tangible ways to create efficiency and accuracy in the healthcare supply chain, HSCA President Curtis Rooney asks the right question in the latest issue of the Journal of Healthcare Contracting: what’s in a number?
Rooney is talking about the Global Location Number, a 13-digit number used to uniquely identify any legal entity, functional entity, or physical location, and an important element of the GS1-US standards many see as means for driving efficiencies in the healthcare supply chain and many on the policy side of the healthcare world know to be a great cost reducer for the industry as a whole.
In his article, Rooney outlines the campaign launched last fall by the members of HSCA and its Committee for Healthcare e-Standards (CHeS) – It Just Takes One. Just-1 challenges the perception that validating Global Location Numbers and transacting with GS1 standards are too difficult or require unavailable healthcare resources.
The power in this 13-digit number is this: just one validated GLN is all a hospital or healthcare provider will need to begin issuing purchase orders electronically under the GS1 standard. GLNs may then be encoded in a GS1 bar code and used to identify ship-to, bill-to and purchased-from information, among other functional data and locations. This will help bring healthcare providers up to the same standard of efficiency and accuracy already achieved in other sectors of the economy, such as retail and grocery stores.
It doesn’t stop there. So says Dennis Byer, Chairman of CHeS. GLNs also enable users/customers to leverage the full functionality of the GS1 system. GLNs can be encoded in GS1-128 bar codes and physically marked onto trade units to identify the parties involved in the transaction (buyer, supplier), transport units (consignor and consignee), and physical locations (place of delivery, place of departure, and point of storage). “The patient safety proposition is equally compelling, and the role that such data will be able to play in future efforts to establish unique device identifiers makes this dual outcome quite possibly the greatest source of savings and patient safety in years,” says Byer.