AIM North America (AIM NA), the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility in North America, reports the following new committee leaders for 2013:

• Tom Dills, President of Elder Mountain Associates LLC (Warner Robbins, GA) will lead the UID Suppliers Alliance.
• George Wright, IV, Vice President, Product Identification & Processing Systems Inc. (Port Chester, NY), will lead the UDI Committee.

These industry experts have been elected chair of their respective committees for one year.

Cognex Corporation has integrated advanced 2DMax+  code reading software technology into the compact DataMan 100 and 200 fixed-mount barcode readers.   With 2DMax+, the readers can now identify and decode severely damaged or poorly marked 2-D matrix codes. Most importantly, the barcode readers are unaffected by variations in lighting, marking method, code quality, or surface finish.

Safecor Health LLC will now be providing medication repackaging and bar coding services to HealthTrust Purchasing Group L.P., in an effort to enhance medication safety and improve pharmacy operations. HealthTrust is a group purchasing organization that serves nearly 1400 not-for-profit and for-profit acute care facilities, as well as 10,600 ambulatory surgery centers, physician practices, and alternate care sites.

No national requirement for pharmaceutical track and trace has materialized to supersede California’s 2015 law, and Unique Device Identification has just been proposed in draft form.

With U.S. mandates slowly emerging, pharmaceutical and medical device companies should consider business needs as they prepare for unique product coding, GS1 representatives urge. The identification standards organization promotes its systems for standardizing product identification throughout the supply chain.

Speakers at GS1 Connect in June shared several business reasons to standardize product identification. Health systems representatives spoke of efficiencies that standardized identification could bring in product and patient identification and tracking as well as improvements in billing, ordering, and inventory. Many spoke of the need for standards, such as the GS1 family of standards.