Cardinal Health to standardise product terminology

In an effort to ally possible safety concerns arising from variable medical product terminology used in online catalogues, Cardinal Health has announced a partnership with the Premier healthcare alliance to standardise this vocabulary.

The company notes that at present standard information regarding products has been absent or inconsistently applied by the medical products industry, with potential difficulty in identifying products that can cause allergic reactions in patients.

Consequently the SupplyLine product comparison and purchasing database from Cardinal Health and Supply Chain Advisor from Premier will use standardised terminology for available devices.

Gina Puglese, vice president of the safety institute at Premier, said: “Our customers have been telling us that they wanted to search our electronic product catalogue to easily identify and select safer products that are made without latex for latex allergic patients and staff, or free of potentially toxic substances like mercury.”

She added that the collaboration agreement with Cardinal Health to present a fixed vocabulary to describe medical and surgical equipment marked significant progress towards attainment of this goal.

Last week, the Premier healthcare alliance signed a group purchasing agreement for diagnostic products with Abbott.

Earlier this month, Cardinal Health announced the finalisation of the sale of its pharmaceutical technologies and services business to the Blackstone group for $3.3 billion (1.67 billion pounds).