Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein continues its journey to full traceability of pharmaceuticals

For the past 15 years, the hospital has implemented and used GS1 standards to enable the traceability of all medicines for improved patient care and safety.

HIAE has partnered with its suppliers to ensure that all medicines at the single-dosage level are each assigned a unique identifier—specifically the GS1 Global Trade Item Number® (GTIN®), batch/lot number and expiration date, encoded in a GS1 DataMatrix barcode. With GS1 identification in place, the hospital can now scan the barcodes of medicines as they travel from receiving to patient bedsides and to HIAE’s surgical centre, completing an end-to-end traceability system. Information captured with each barcode scan is downloaded into the hospital’s inventory management system and its new electronic medical record (EMR) system. More than 240,000 single-dosage units each month are labelled at suppliers’ manufacturing sites, saving HIAE more than 600 hours and R$13,620 in associated labour costs monthly.