The following Facility Registry (FR) capabilities enable interoperability between the health and supply chain domains.
Why is this important?
See our Value Statement for an Integrated Health and Supply Chain.
Top Priority Requests
These are the highest-priority capabilities of a Facility Registry (FR) that enable interoperability between the health and supply chain domains:
- Capability for FR to include all facilities that can hold stock (warehouses, not just health service delivery points).
Discussion: It's important to consider that different facility types may have different governance or master data management, such as different stakeholders who assign ID numbers or manage the official lists. Also, some different facility types may have different optional fields of data. There is no known global standard list of categories/types at this time. - Capability for FR to include a GLN (GS1 Global Location Number) with any facility.
Discussion: The timeline and approach for adoption of GLNs depends on country context. Use of GLNs may come as a result of barcoding products and barcoding shipments. Alternatively, adoption may be driven by suppliers or 3PL (third-party logistics providers). Or it may be adopted to support ASNs (Advanced Shipment Notices) and other advanced GS1 practices. In total, it is important to consider the context as well as the costs for using GLNs (there is a cost to assign GLNs in the GS1 system). Overall, product barcoding is a more immediate need with higher benefits compared to location/GLN barcoding. Once barcoding practices are introduced, the use of GLNs unlocks additional value. For more details about the GLN field (data type, length, and identifying authority URL), see the 2018-11-16 notes.
Second Priority Requests
These are additional capabilities of a Facility Registry (FR) that can enable additional interoperability:
- Capability for FR to capture multiple hierarchies, such as geographic and government administrative hierarchies that can differ from programmatic supervision hierarchies and differ from supply line hierarchies (warehouse X supplies health facilities Y and Z).
Discussion: Some FR tools and standards already support this (eg, Resource Map and CSD), and others do not yet (eg, mCSD support for this is coming soon). There are also many other use cases where political hierarchies may need to differ from reporting hierarchies. - Capability for FR to include facility-within-a-facility relationships. For example, a regional hospital facility might include a maternity ward facility as well as an attached regional warehouse. Medicines might be tracked and inventoried at those locations separately, and stock movements might be recorded from one to another (such as from the warehouse to the maternity ward).
Discussion: Facility-within-a-facility relationships can be modeled as parent-child relationships (eg, child facility A is located within parent facility B). FHIR Location uses the Location.partOf data to capture this.