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.
All the resources of UNICOM's Community of Expertise & Knowledge transfer webinars
The recordings of the Community of Expertise webinars initiated in July 2020 and the NCAs knowledge transfer webinars are all available on the UNICOM youtube channel.
The buttons below gives you access to all the sessions organised so far and direct links to the videos and presentations.
The UNICOM final conference took place on April 25-26 2024 in Brussels
After more than 4 years of intensive work the UNICOM project will come to an end at the end of May 2024.
We believe that the project has achieved very susbstantial results and that the road is now wide open for a wide and consistent implementation of the IDMP standards along the whole value chain. It has created a unique path to inyeroperbaility for medicinal products identification.
On Friday 26th of April we discussed with representatives from EMA, FDA, Member States medicinal products and eHealth agencies and other key stakeholders how to continue to progress swiftly both at European and global levels. Get also to learn how this project can bring an important contribution to the upcoming European Health Data Space.
UNICOM has created an impetus to solve a key interoperability issue which can create a lot of new value. The UNICOM White Paper wants to make sure that the momentum will not be lost.
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
On May 13 UNICOM partners IHE and HL7 organised a final Industry workshop to “handover” UNICOM assets to active working groups and projects.
These three videos explains how UNICOM assets will be used: The first explians the contribution of UNICOM to data exchange, the second one connects UNICOM to IHE volume 4 and the last one explains why UNICOM is key enabler for the upcoming EHDS. You may also witness the conversation which followed the presentations
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.
Latest news
The UNICOM Test Lab
Looking across the landscape of IDMP implementation, the UNICOM project aims to develop the following testing scenarios as part of the UNICOM Test Lab:
- Submission of variations
- Updates to the MPD
- Updates to the NCPeH product database
- Including substitution in eDispensation
- Product lookup for patient facing apps
Get tuned about the test-lab approach
