What is GS1 Data Care?
A program to optimise the product information of medical devices in GDSN / GS1 Data Source and the use of product data in hospitals.
For whom?
For hospitals and suppliers of medical devices.
Why invest in product data optimisation?
The importance of high-quality product data for medical devices has increased:
Legislation (national and international): tracing medical articles. Information is lacking for mandatory registration and for providing to the patient. Obtaining and optimising product data takes too much time. Efficiency is needed for suppliers. Separate requests from healthcare institutions take a lot of time and are error-prone.
What is needed for this?
More product data for medical devices: New product data from the Uniform Dataset. Information on the cleaning, disinfection, and sterilisation of medical devices. Product data from more suppliers. Not all suppliers are connected to GDSN. Investment from all involved stakeholders. Understanding how the processes work together (supplier and hospitals). Collaboration. Use of GDSN - no more Excel - one source.
How did we come to GS1 Data Care?
Between April and October 2023, a Proof of Concept was conducted by nine healthcare institutions and eight suppliers of medical devices (national and international). Agreements were made on how the quality of data could be improved, so that all hospitals can receive reliable and complete data from their assortment. To fully rely on GDSN as the Single Source of Truth and to fully utilize the data, both parties must cooperate.
The program is a complement to the Global Data Synchronisation Network (GDSN) and GS1 Data Source and is live since May.
NFU and NVZ
The Dutch Association of Hospitals (NVZ) and the purchasing organisation of the Dutch Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU) endorse the importance of complete and correct product data. They are involved and committed to ensuring that suppliers only submit medical device product data via GDSN and that healthcare providers focus on checking the data in their processes
Control of product data
For GS1 Data Care, the GLN GS1 Netherlands Healthcare (8712345013257) is used. Suppliers are requested to publish their product data to this GLN. The published data is only made available to hospitals.