The Working Group on Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP) has updated its Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document to address questions related to IDMP standards and help support their implementation.
IDMP is a set of standards developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (www.iso.org). Together, these five standards will make it possible to uniquely identify medicinal products and to standardize the electronic exchange of medicinal product information.
The IDMP standards establish common definitions, common identifiers and common data structures.
Ultimately, IDMP is about patient safety. The objectives are to (1) improve global pharmacovigilance capability; (2) reduce the chance of patient safety and medication incidents; and (3) speed up the time needed to identify, assess and respond to patient safety or medication incidents, including those that might arise from counterfeit and/or substandard drugs. Widespread use of the IDMP standards to uniquely identify medical products will contribute to these objectives by assuring that analysis of safety signals specific to a given medical product is in fact an analysis of data associated with the same medical product. Currently, there are wide variations in the naming, labeling and packaging of the same medical product, and ambiguity associated with different medical products that may be appear to be the same medical product
This FAQ is intended to be a living document and will be regularly updated as needed over time. More information can be found on the IDMP WG page.