U.S. Industry Adoption Task Force (IATF) Roadmap

Important preliminary remarks

  • The IATF Roadmap was developed in 2007 and has not been updated.
  • Consult the current GS1 Healthcare standards when planning your implementation activities.
  • We recommend to use the document solely for education purposes.

The inclusion of the IATF Roadmap on our website is meant to recognise and appreciate the tremendous amount of work that was volunteered by member companies in creating this body of work, and to further recognise the valuable contributions that this work provided for the subsequent GS1 Healthcare workgroups.

What is the IATF Roadmap?

In 2006, the leadership team of the former EPCglobal Healthcare & Life Science Industry Action Group (HLS IAG) established the EPCglobal Industry Adoption Task Force (IATF).

The IATF was tasked to create the first holistic strategy to meet California and other urgent compliance initiatives. A cross-functional team of 80+ participants, most representing global healthcare entities, was mobilised from June 2006 to October 2007 and worked closely with the US FDA and the California Board of Pharmacy.

The IATF Roadmap was completed around the time that the EPCglobal HLS IAG and the GS1 HUG agreed to merge to form GS1 Healthcare, one common voice representing all healthcare stakeholders globally. The document was never formally approved nor published by GS1 or EPCglobal. The document was always intended to be a ‘point-in-time’ summary of the issues, challenges, and directions in addressing serialisation and traceability in selected healthcare markets - and its content was intended to be transferred into future workgroups to resolve the identified issues and flesh-out the high-level recommendations.

  • The IATF deliverable was used as input to new global standards using newly created work teams.
  • The IATF Roadmap was a preliminary work which has been in circulation and has been widely presented to industry groups and attendees of several conferences in the U.S. and remains a recognised source of information.

Recommended usage of this document

The recommended usage of this document is now to use it solely for education purposes, with the understanding that the following GS1 Healthcare standard activities and groups should be consulted for the latest information:

  • AIDC Application Standards Work Team
  • Global Healthcare Data Synchronisation and Product Classification Work Teams
  • Traceability in Healthcare Work Team

The IATF Roadmap remains a valuable historical document that can be used in the near-term to quickly educate stakeholders on the following topics:

  • What is serialisation?
  • What is traceability?
  • What are the issues, challenges, opportunities for various stakeholder groups?
  • Additional background education on inference, barcode and RFID co-existence, and other important topics

However, this document was completed in late 2007 and has not been updated to reflect the substantial forward progress achieved by GS1 Healthcare workgroups.

GS1 Healthcare recommends all companies familiarise themselves with the current state of standards in development to plan their specific implementation activities.

 

 

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