At the final days of UNICOM - the good work continues

- Digitalising will help us increase our effectiveness, quality and safety for the patients and it will help us cooperate nationally and internationally. The key to unlock all these possibilities is a common identification for pharmaceuticals, and the standard for this is ISO IDMP, Hågå states.

Director General Audun Hågå, second from right, at the Policy Panel: Towards a wide IDMP implementation in Europe, at the Final UNICOM Conference in Brussels late April this year.

UNICOM promotes univocal identification of medicinal products

ISO IDMP (Identification of Medicinal Products) provides univocal identification of medicinal products to improve patient safety and enable better healthcare for all. The UNICOM project has given a powerful impulse to implementation of ISO IDMP in EU Member States drug databases, supporting safe cross-border ePrescription and eDispensation, Patient Summary and effective pharmacovigilance.

Once EU-interoperable data on medicines taken by patients become available, further benefits will accrue through better health data for improved clinical decision support, patient empowerment, public health and clinical research. Implementation of IDMP is a prerequisite for safe medicinal data sharing within the European Health Data Space, EHDS.      

NOMA participates in the UNICOM project among 26 national Drug and eHealth Agencies from 19 countries. In Norway, the implementation of ISO IDMP is performed as part of two projects in NOMA, DELE and SAFEST.

What is DELE and SAFEST?

The DELE project (Dele means Sharing in Norwegian) will replace our current internal systems with a new ISO IDMP compliant platform, to enhance data quality and efficiency, support our business processes, and offer standardised drug information. However, replacement of our current register is not complete, and we are currently planning an analysis for the remaining work, including integration with EMAs SPOR services (substances, products, organisations and referentials).

The SAFEST project has established a new information service to meet new demands for drug information in the Norwegian hospitals. These ISO IDMP based FHIR services support clinical use of medicinal information, including full content of both manufactured and administrable products. In addition, SAFEST has developed a generator for identification of the groups of administrable products according to their clinical effect for the patients (PhPID), including both an algorithm and a data model. The generator is based on knowledge acquired through tight collaboration with the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, UMC, as well as the relevant analyses performed throughout the SAFEST project.

In the middle Helga Festøy, Head of unit at NOMA, with Olof Lagerlund (left) and Malin Fladvad (right) from Uppsala Monitoring Centre, UMC, at the Final UNICOM Conference.

The project has participants from both The Regional Health Authorities (hospitals) and The Directorate of Health, in addition to NOMA. 

- The SAFEST project has established a new national information service for medicinal data that can be used across clinical and regulatory processes. In addition, the project has initiated a fruitful collaboration between the health and medicines authorities and the hospitals in Norway, says Elin May Merry, from the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority.

As a result, NOMA was identified as an innovator by the EU Innovation Radar last summer, along the agencies in Austria and Spain.

SAFEST will eventually merge with the new DELE platform and will provide all information from NOMA based on ISO IDMP. Netcompany is our strategic IT-partner in all projects.

- The UNICOM project has given us unprecedented opportunities for developing new solutions, knowledge sharing and collaboration with European colleagues who share the same challenges as us, claims Tor-Arne Berg, project coordinator for UNICOM and DELE in NOMA. 
- We will contribute to keep up the steam and contribute to the network!

All the delegates from Norway at the Final Conference, from left: Bernd Moeske, South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority; Gunnar Carelius, Head of IT at NOMA; Elin May Merry, South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority; Audun Hågå, Director General; Helga Festøy, Head of Unit for data distribution and Tor-Arne Berg, project coordinator for UNICOM and DELE, all three from NOMA.

The UNICOM-project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Grant Agreement No. 875299.