GS1 Healthcare meets with healthcare authorities in Asia
Recognising the importance of the Asia-Pacific region, GS1 Healthcare met with Healthcare authorities in China, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan and during the last month.
In Beijing, GS1 China had organised a meeting with Prof. Gao Yanjie, Director of the Department of InformationTechnology for Healthcare in the Ministry of Health. Prof. Yanjie took time for a detailed discussion on GS1’s work on global standard development. She understood and clearly supported the importance of global harmonisation. Yan Liang, Director of Legal & International Affairs of the Shanghai FDA, presented the work done so far to enable traceability, in particular for implants. The SFDA has regulated the marking of these products with GTIN, lot number and expiry date. There are plans to roll out this approach in the whole country and the SFDA is playing an important role in this. Mr. Liang could show one of the first implementations of the traceability system during a visit to the Shanghai Renji Hospital, a big hospital with over 1.000 beds, where the staff is scanning the implants in the operation theatres and updating automatically the patient file as well as uploading the information to a database in the SFDA.
Raymond Wong, Chief Manager of the Hong Kong Hospital Authorities (HKHA), explained to GS1 Hong Kong and GS1 GO how they are working on concrete projects on using standards to improve patient safety and supply chain efficiency. HKHA also announced that they will become a voting member of the global Healthcare user group, GS1 Healthcare.
GS1 Korea and GS1 GO met in Seoul with the director and his staff of the Office for Healthcare Policy. They have recently released a law requesting automatic identification of pharmaceutical products with GTIN, lot number and expiry date in a GS1 DataMatrix. They were very interested to hear about the global developments and in which other countries worldwide DataMatrix is already used today. The MoH has announced the timelines of 2010/2011 for implementation and is now working with GS1 Korea and the industry on technical questions.
Also in Taiwan the Ministry has a clear understanding of the importance of automatic identification for healthcare products and works closely in some projects with GS1 Taiwan. However due to cost constraints they do not plan at the moment to work more intensively on this subject, but want to be kept updated on international developments.
GS1 Healthcare Conference in Tokyo: in all dialogues, the representatives from all Healthcare authorities expressed their strong interest in active participation at the GS1 Healthcare conference from 28 to 30 October in Tokyo, Japan.
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