The UNICOM project is helping to ensure that any medicine and what it contains can be accurately identified anywhere in the world. We are working to improve patient safety and enable better healthcare for all.

UNICOM in a nutshell

UNICOM is about improved patient safety and better healthcare for all – it focuses on the implementation of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) suite of IDMP (IDentification of Medicinal Products) standards. Work will involve further development, testing, implementation and diffusion of these standards for

regulatory purposes of national medicinal products authorities and the European Medicines Agency (EMA)
global pharmacovigilance
advancing cross-border digital health services, particularly ePrescription
better healthcare for all, public health services, clinical research, big data analytics, artificial intelligence applications.

IDMP in a capsule

IDMP in a capsule helps EVERYONE to better understand how IDMP standards “work” throughout the life-cycle stages of a medicinal product

All the resources of UNICOM's Community of Expertise

The recordings of the Community of Expertise webinars initiated in July 2020 are all available on the UNICOM youtube channel.

The button below gives you access to all the sessions organised so far and direct links to the videos and presentations.

UNICOM eHealth Stakeholders OUTREACH webinar

The IDMP suite of standards is about the accurate identification of medicines and UNICOM’s goal is to have them widely implemented.

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis provides convincing examples of the urgent need to identify medicinal products correctly. People, patients, and healthcare professionals need now to rely on globally comparable quality information for clinical safety, compare outcomes achieved with different kinds of interventions and take sound decisions related to pharmacovigilance, drugs shortages, and dynamic clinical trials.

On Wednesday 21^st of April, UNICOM organised its first workshop dedicated to end users. It explains the issues at stake via the use of true-to-life stories. It has highlighted the concrete benefits of IDMP implementation for at least four stakeholder groups and has collected feedback from stakeholders’ representatives (citizens, patients, physicians, hospitals, pharmacists…).

Recordings

It is UNICOM’s policy to make available all the resources produced by the project as soon as possible and to the widest possible audience.
Every month, UNICOM organises knowledge transfer and interactive exchange with the interested communities of expertise on several aspects and challenges related to IDMP implementation.
All those sessions are recorded and made publicly available on the UNICOM youtube channel.

Events

Looking for a definition of a term? Check out the UNICOM glossary!

Medicinal product information, medicines development and research into the safety of medicines use a large number of specialised scientific terms. These terms each have a very precise meaning, and it is important that all of the scientific, regulatory and healthcare communities use these terms in the same way, to avoid misunderstandings and mistakes. Members of the public, including pregnant women, will sometimes encounter these terms in material they are given or find on websites.

The UNICOM glossary is openly accessible. Here, we have listed many of these specialised terms and provided their formal definitions. We have tried to find the best respected source of each definition. For many of the terms we have also provided a more understandable explanation of the term. Most of these explanations have come from other projects and initiatives, which we have acknowledged and to whom we are grateful for the permission to include in our glossary.

We are now making this public because we believe there is enough content already to be useful to our project collaborators and to members of the public we engage with!

We will continue to expand the glossary, and improve the explanations within it.