Hello all,
In my Secure Tracking and Tracing using GS1 and SAP OER - Leverage GS1 EPCIS in Healthcare – EPISODE I I described what GS1 is, what GS1 does, and what standards GS1 provides.
In this one I will show what it looks like in the real world. To do this I'd like to use this picture where you can see the complete healthcare supply chain, from the drug manufacturer to the patient:
The process starts on the life sciences side with the manufacturing of drugs. There, the drugs will be labeled e.g. with a SGTIN and aggregated to big boxes, and these are in turn put on a pallet (SSCC). Additional to that, the SGTIN, batch, name, and expiration date information will be sent to our central OER (object event repository).
On the way to the place of destination the drugs may need to pass through customs, where the customs-officer can perform an authentication against our central OER to find potential counterfeits and make sure that there are no fake products on the palette.
In the real world we may also have different wholesalers between the manufacturer and the hospital or pharmacy. Here the pallet can be re-arranged for one special customer. The wholesaler will also read and update the central repository.
Now we will ship the palette to the hospital, and exactly at this point starts our prototype.
On the next slide you will see the processes we will cover with our solution:
Our process starts with the goods receipt in the warehouse. There the warehouse worker scans the palette (SSCC) and gets all information about the drugs on the palette out of the OER. Based on that information he posts the goods receipt in the SAP system.
In the next step we admit a patient in our Patient Management system and also send this information into our OER. During the doctor's round, the doctor prescribes different drugs to the patient. In the central pharmacy the pharmacists pick the serialized drugs for the patient in a daily drug dispenser. This container will be sent to the ward. To avoid medication errors, the nurse checks if the drug container and the patient match. If not, she would get a warning.
This is very important. With our solution we make sure that the patient gets the right drug at the right time and in the right quantity.
After we dispensed the dugs to the patient and update the OER we are able to do very important reporting because we now have the full history of the drug and the full medication history of our patient in the OER.
On the one hand we can get all the drugs a patient got, and on the other hand we can see which patients got a specific drug. Of course, we can also search by batch and obtain all patients that got drugs out of this batch.
This reporting functionality is very important e.g. in case of a manufacturer's recall. You can immediately see where are the affected drugs, if any of them have been consumed, and by whom.
I know this is a lot of information and sometimes hard to catch. Therefore we developed a small video (7 minutes) that will show you the whole process.
You can access via the SAP Fan Page on Facebook :
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lean-Operations/76156926556
Or directly from YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6G3tbYdaHo
In the meantime I'd love to get your feedback. Is this topic interesting for your business? Do you have similar ideas and/or intentions?
Regards from Walldorf
Stefan Weigand
2 Comments