Linking AMT and NPC: Improving Medicines Management and Safety
Published 15 June 2018
To ensure the safe, reliable and consistent transfer of medicines information across all points of care, it is important that standardised clinical terminology and physical product identification related to pharmaceutical products is adopted. This will assist in the provision of a trusted source of prescribed, dispensed and administered medicines information for health professionals and consumers, further contributing to high-quality sustainable healthcare.
An accessible standardised terminology is available through the use of the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT). The AMT enables national alignment of clinical concept for each medicinal product to the physical form of the product via a linkage to the Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) that identifies the physical product. The GTIN provides the primary identifier within product data and the physical marking (barcoding) of products.
In Australia’s National Digital Health Strategy, Strategic Priority 3 is ‘High-quality data with a commonly understood meaning that can be used with confidence’. This Strategic Priority highlights that “interoperability of the clinical data is essential to ensure high-quality sustainable healthcare”. In collaboration with the healthcare industry the Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency), has co-designed a potential solution to enable these two pieces of information (AMT and GTIN data) to be linked nationally by medicines manufacturers (product sponsors) and provided to healthcare organisations. This ensures the linking is undertaken and managed by one source, i.e. the product sponsor. The communication of this linked information will then be exchanged via GS1 Australia’s National Product Catalogue (NPC) data synchronisation service. Various national stakeholders have expressed their interest in using this linked information, including jurisdictional purchasing and supply chain authorities and pharmacy software vendors.
If you are a product sponsor and interested in participating in this work, or anyone with a general interest email or phone: 1300 901 001.
Watch the webinars:
Overview - Linking AMT and NPC: Improving Medicines Management and Safety
This webinar was recorded on 10 April 2019 and discusses the following topics:
- An overview of the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT)
- How does the AMT relate to the supply chain and physical product data
- An overview of the initiative to link AMT CTPP codes with GTINs through inclusion in the National Product Catalogue (NPC)
- Requirements for pharmaceutical product suppliers in the initiative
Linking AMT and GTIN: Project Requirements for Pharmaceutical Suppliers
This webinar was recorded on 9 July 2019 and discusses the following topics:
- Recap of the Linking AMT and GTIN initiative
- Requirements for pharmaceutical suppliers
- The contents of the document pack
- How to validate draft AMT-GTIN map, including searching for CTPP data using Shrimp browser
- Business-as-usual process and maintenance, including sending product gap requests to the Agency
- GS1 data quality reports for CTPP data