Take it from the Irish: Just do it

Last year, around this time, I was completing a Capstone project for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on whether manufacturers considered how hospitals would use unique device identifiers (UDIs) when forming their approach to compliance with the FDA’s UDI rule. As part of the research, I found a striking difference between those manufacturers who engaged with customers and those who did not. Those who reached out to customers were twice as likely to see opportunities to derive value from the investment required to comply with the regulation and, as such, went beyond doing only what was required.

What is it that compels an organization — whether supplier or provider — to do more than is required or is funded, especially in a highly regulated industry like healthcare? This is a question I hear asked increasingly in both North America and Europe.

For example, at two conferences in the United Kingdom in late 2017, people wondered: If the Department of Health’s Scan4Safety program is so successful (see March 2017 issue of Standard Practices), why hasn’t it expanded beyond the six original demonstration sites? Those organizations were given seed funding for the program, and the Department of Health has said it would like to expand the program to 24 more sites. But so far, there has been no money allocated for the expansion. At the GS1 UK annual conference, Bob Alexander, deputy chief executive for NHS improvement, said the annualized savings at the demonstration sites is £420 million, far more than the original investment, adding that the question should not be “Should we expand the program?” but rather “Why aren’t we?” While some other NHS trusts have begun utilizing GS1 standards for various activities and with good results, none have yet tried to replicate the Scan4Safety program.”

Contrast that with the experience of St. James’s Hospital in Dublin. John Cotter, the hospital’s Programme Director, Activity Based Funding, said they launched their Scan for Surgery program without any government funding, and without any regrets. The initiative, which scans barcodes for all products used in the operating room, paid for itself in just one year.

St. James’s also tracks the time spent by those involved in patient care using a touch screen that is part of its operating theatre management system. Tracking both supply costs and labor has enabled Cotter and the team to be able to more fully analyze costs per procedure and by patient and physician among other variables. But this is more than a cost accounting exercise. Cotter says while hospitals can achieve short term return on investment from things like inventory savings, the real benefits will come from data that helps standardize clinical practice based on what has been proven to work best. Manufacturers will be able to design new products and make enhancements to existing ones by using data linking clinical product efficacy to patient outcomes and complications data. St. James’s has made the investment in capturing product identifiers at the point of use. As manufacturers label more of their products with unique device identifiers (coming as a result of the European version of the UDI rule) and more hospitals adopt similar scanning technology, Cotter and Callahan look forward to a robust data ecosystem that can help drive better decisions by providers and suppliers, improve patient safety, and lower costs for all involved.