Utilize MediSpan Generic Product ID for Bedside Medication Verification

Currently, bedside medication verification is limited to NDC screening that only looks at a local, site-specific table of NDC's to match before administration. This is troublesome for the following reasons:

1. Each site has to manually maintain NDC's on hundreds of products.

2. Errors can be easily made as there is no generic equivalence screen when adding new NDC's. For example, when adding a new barcode to an item, any site could accidentally scan the barcode of a different product into the table.

3. There are only 11 entries possible for each item. In any given year, a pharmacy may receive products from several different manufacturers. And even within identical products and manufactures, NDC numbers change frequently. This results in a full list of 11 barcodes for many items, and when a new product comes in or an NDC changes on an existing product you have to delete one of your previous NDC's. If you replace the NDC of a product still stocked on a nursing station, this will result in medication verification errors at bedside. Resolving this is at best arduous, and I would say essentially impossible as it would require checking products stocked all over the hospital every time you needed to add a new barcode to a full list.

However, there is a solution: MediSpan Generic Product Identification, abbreviated GPID (see here)

For each Pharmacy Item in the formulary, in addition to the NDC number listed on page 1 of pharmacy information, you could manually enter or (preferably) automatically fill the GPID based on that NDC. Then during bedside verification, the UPC/NDC scanned could be translated to a GPID and checked against the GPID of the item in question. An example of this might be Lisinopril 10mg Tablets (GPID 36100030000310). There are 132 active NDC's in MediSpan for Lisinopril 10mg, and likely multiple UPC barcodes associated if they are unit dosed products. However all 132 have the exact same GPID. This therapeutic equivalence resolution to GPID is utilized by every prescription program I have used.

This could be optional. You could retain the ability of manually adding barcodes in the of case new products arriving before updates to the database or for compounded or otherwise unlisted items within MediSpan. You could integrate it in other areas of the software for therapeutic substitution utilizing just the first 2-6 digits (although that may be how it works currently). And, this would make maintaining the pharmacy database much easier (or I would say possible) as well as making it less likely that a barcode unassociated with a particular item is scanned into the item master in error.

Moreover, I believe TruBridge already uses the MediSpan database for clinical monitoring and may even be using the GPID database for therapeutic substitution.