Standard Reality: How a Canadian effort can teach the world

Imagine you are a healthcare system interested in adopting GS1 standards – where do you start? That’s the question that Alberta Health Services (AHS) asked and then took an important step forward, leading a cross-industry effort that will deliver value to the Canadian healthcare system as well as many other organizations around the world facing similar challenges.

The reality is that data standards implementation is a team sport. No single healthcare organization can do it alone. It requires active engagement between healthcare providers, manufacturers, distributors, group purchasing organizations and technology partners.

Alberta Health Services is Canada’s first and largest province-wide, fully integrated health system. Through its leadership, it has garnered the support and involvement of some of its key suppliers in a collaborative effort to share and transact with GS1 standards. The goal of the initiative is to identify the value of GS1 standards implementation in terms of not only business outcomes derived from data synchronization and e-commerce transactions, but also patient quality and safety improvements. The standards being implemented into various technology systems and processes include GS1 Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) and Global Location Number (GLNs).

Paving the way

The initiative is still a work in progress. At its conclusion, the participants will deliver a simplified, sustainable and global model for standards implementation that others in the healthcare industry can utilize.

The participants are:

• Alberta Health Services (AHS)
• Baxter Corporation
• Cardinal Health Canada
• Canadian Hospital Specialties Ltd.
• Cook (Canada) Inc.
• GHX
• Medtronic
• Johnson & Johnson Medical Products Inc.
• MEDEC
• Zimmer Biomet

Jitendra Prasad, Chief Program Officer for Contracting, Procurement & Supply Management at AHS, explained the primary motivation behind the initiative: “We are making this investment to improve the supply chain organization’s ability to support patient care. Through the adoption of GS1 standards, we can manage the products needed for healthcare delivery to ensure that they are not only available at the right time and place, but also that caregivers have the information they need about those products to serve the people of Alberta.”

Since its launch, the participants have been working on phase I of the project, which is to create a sustainable, efficient model for sharing product data via Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) – certified data pools between participating supplier/distributor stakeholders and AHS. Below is an outline of some of the steps accomplished to date:

• Collectively defined the product data attributes that provide value to AHS and determined that the participating suppliers are able to collect and share those attributes. Participating suppliers have now shared that information with AHS.
• Defined the process for supplier publication to a GDSN-certified data pool.
• Defined the GLNs for AHS and implemented the technology processes needed for AHS to receive the data for review.
• Sent subscription requests on behalf of AHS through the GDSN to the respective supplier partners.
• Published supplier data via a GDSN-certified data pool to AHS for review and integration into supply chain, finance and patient care systems.

Gaining insight

As of July 2016, over 8,000 records have been successfully published to AHS via the data pool. Once the data publication is complete, AHS will analyze the data to determine how the data provided by suppliers aligns to the data AHS requested.

The collective AHS initiative team identified the following insights/lessons learned to date on the project.

• It’s real: Data standards have become a reality in healthcare. Healthcare providers are beginning to use data pools as a way to collect the product information they need to optimize clinical and business processes. And suppliers are eager to engage. There has been a lot of talk about data standards in the industry. Now, we are seeing real progress being made.
• It’s provider driven: We are seeing data standards efforts primarily driven by cutting-edge provider organizations such as AHS. They are leading many of these initiatives and engaging their suppliers.
• It’s still pretty new: While data standardization and synchronization have been around for years and are well established in many industries, they are still new to healthcare. Because of this, it is important that providers and suppliers allocate adequate time and resources to define the attributes, harvest them and publish them. Furthermore, they must have the infrastructure and processes in place to use them.
• It’s an iterative process: Don’t expect a big bang approach to be successful when it comes to healthcare data standards. Nobody is going to get exactly what they want from the start. Not every supplier will be able to provide every attribute that is requested on day one. Likewise, not every provider is capable of consuming that data into their internal systems (e.g., clinical, finance, ERP). Providers should recognize this and prioritize the data attributes most valuable to them. Suppliers should prioritize the data they need to collect, get the necessary processes in place and determine the resources they need to make it happen.

While primarily driven to address the needs of the AHS and the patients it serves, this Canadian effort will provide valuable lessons that can be shared globally with other providers and their trading partners. We will keep you apprised of further progress and lessons learned in future issues of Standard Practices.