UNICOM

UNICOM is about improved patient safety and better healthcare for all – it focuses on the implementation of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) suite of IDMP (IDentification of Medicinal Products) standards.
Work will involve further development, testing, implementation and diffusion of these standards for:

• regulatory purposes of national medicinal products authorities and the European Medicines Agency (EMA)
• global pharmacovigilance
• advancing cross-border digital health services, particularly ePrescription
• better healthcare for all, public health services, clinical research, big data analytics, artificial intelligence applications.

UNICOM is dedicated to

• improving patient safety globally
• facilitating better healthcare for all

Patient safety issues, like medication errors, are due to numerous reasons, but many of them are related to a lack of readability of prescriptions, sometimes the partial absence of well detailed, structured and coded information on medicinal products – which also may somewhat differ depending on the national market, or missing information on other medicines taken by the patient.

The current digitalization of the healthcare sector may contribute substantially to reduce these threats, but without the adoption and concrete implementation of common conceptual and semantic standards to accurately identify and provide full, consistent and high quality data on all medicinal products available in the respective national or European market, the expected added value cannot be entirely delivered with data unable to travel between systems, regions, countries or use-cases.

All of this will be of great benefit to patients as well as healthcare professionals, and contribute to better healthcare for all across the Union.

The UNICOM Innovation Action has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 875299.