The EAN•UCC system is developing not only by operating in an increasing number of countries, but it is also expanding its substantive scope so that it can bring the greatest possible benefits to producers and traders, as well as to service companies cooperating with them, such as freight forwarders, banks, etc.
To what extent it is useful as a tool for improving the management of entire economic sectors can be evidenced by the actions currently being taken by the Ministry of Health, Health Insurance Funds, and IT companies serving pharmacies and their relations with the environment. The conclusions from the meeting held on this matter at the headquarters of the National Union of Health Insurance Funds on January 17th of this year are unambiguous. A few words on this subject. Currently, in the national distribution of medicines, codes on prescriptions are beginning to be used, primarily for the purpose of unambiguous identification of each prescription for a reimbursed medicine. Although the first version of the relevant regulation regarding prescriptions contains a provision on the possibility of using any barcode, the Ministry of Health has already announced a restriction. Instead of the provision that these can be one- or two-dimensional codes, it is proposed to write: either an ITF code or a UCC•EAN-128 code. The ITF was temporarily included because some Health Insurance Funds operate on RUMs (Medical Services Register), where this type of barcode is used, and some Funds are already after or in the process of tenders for printing prescriptions with this code. At the same time, all participants of the meeting, among whom, alongside the representative of the Ministry of Health (MZ), were the people most interested in this topic, i.e., representatives of: the National Union of Health Insurance Funds, individual Regional Health Insurance Funds and the Industry Health Insurance Fund, as well as their IT specialists, and representatives of IT companies serving the Funds and most pharmacies, i.e., the companies Kamsoft and ComputerLand Zdrowie, as well as the national EAN organization, accepted that since ultimately all business information will be encoded according to global EAN•UCC standards, the remaining Health Insurance Funds can provide the prescription number immediately in the UCC•EAN-128 code with AI (90) – this is the so-called Application Identifier for bilaterally agreed data, followed in this code by the individual prescription number. The prescription number is assigned by each Health Insurance Fund, which must ensure that this identifier does not repeat for all doctors and hospitals with which it has signed a contract. It must additionally take into account the type of prescription (the regulation distinguishes 4 types of prescriptions) – this number has a total of 20 digits. Therefore, since, in accordance with international recommendations for the entire healthcare system, it has been accepted that EAN•UCC codes will ultimately be used everywhere, appropriate preparations should be started as early as possible, which also require specifying the content of several relatively new MZ regulations.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2001/1.