OMG Pharmaceutical Industry Supply Chain Management Effort

At the OMG Technical Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 9 and 10, the OMG will kick-off a new initiative, Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Management. OMG Members and guests from the pharmaceutical industry will launch an effort to speed the standardization of the pharmaceutical supply chain management process. This initiative was established to address the external system interface and integration issues that limit the pharmaceutical industry's ability to embrace and optimize their traditional- and e-commerce potential.

The objective of this meeting is to bring together pharmaceutical technology representatives, including general purchasing organizations, pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmaceutical and medical/surgical supply wholesalers, major pharmacy chains and healthcare providers to begin the process of standardizing the complete, front-end to back-end pharmaceutical supply chain management process using the OMG's rapid, open, vendor-neutral, consensus-building standardization process and leveraging its existing adopted standards.

Organized by OMG Members under the aegis of the OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force and integrating the efforts of both MedContrax-led Pharma Initiative and the RxHub Initiative, this two day meeting will begin with overviews by the organizers. Representatives from the Healthcare Distribution Management Association, HDMA, www.healthcaredistribution.org and National Council for Prescription Drug Programs, NCPDP, www.ncpdp.org will also be on hand to give presentations explaining their roles in these initiatives.

The organizers will also present their research to date on how and why standardizing the complete pharmaceutical supply chain management process is so important to manufacturers, wholesalers, buyers, doctors and patients. The second day of this meeting will feature technical presentations by OMG Members, which will highlight adopted vertical and platform OMG specifications that are being considered for this initiative. During the afternoon, attendees are invited to join a number of breakout meetings where all participants are encouraged to share their industry needs and ideas of this initiative.

About RXHub

The three founding partners of RxHub determined that there was value in creating a solution that would advance the efficiencies of the process of prescription writing and dispensing for all stakeholders. With this shared goal, RxHub was developed, an electronic exchange that would link physicians, pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and health plans.

The new system is intended to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the prescription writing and dispensing process, improve patient safety and reduce costs. A standardized electronic prescription process will increase the rate of adoption by physicians and become a valuable healthcare tool that benefits all stakeholders.

RxHub would serve as an "open utility" and perform three functions:

• Standard Setting - Work with existing standard setting organizations to help establish standards governing the communications and applicable interfaces among the various participants (PBMs, point of care companies, health plans, and pharmacies).
• Personal Identification/PBM Locator Service - Develop and implement personal identification technology that would enable POC applications to specifically identify individuals in order to determine inclusion in participating PBM and health plan databases; and to select and communicate with the appropriate PBM (with specific clinical and coverage information concerning the specific patient) during the prescribing process
• Connectivity Hub - Serve as a "connectivity hub" through which electronic prescribing communications, including electronic prescriptions, could be communicated between and among physicians using point of care technology, PBMs, health plans, and pharmacies.

About MedContrax and the Pharma Initiative

The Pharmaceutical Initiative was created to streamline the pharmaceutical contracting process by taking advantage of advances in e-commerce technology. The initiative will address external system interface and integration issues that limit the pharmaceutical industry's ability to embrace and optimize their e-commerce potential. Because many of the problems relate to the contracting process, the trading partners asked MedContrax, an OMG member and leading sales information and contracting network solutions company to participate in the initiative.

The trading partners represent the three major supply chain components: pharmaceutical manufacturer, buying group and wholesaler. The Healthcare Distribution Management Association (HDMA) has been asked to serve as an advocate for its members in this initiative. The trading partners have also received support of the Object Management Group (OMG) and intend on using the OMG process to standardize on currently used and future processes and interfaces. The associations will serve as the conduit for industry and technological interoperability and standardization activities.

The OMG invites open participation from other trading partners, vendors, integrators and medical and pharmaceutical professions focused on integration and leverage of legacy systems (such as contract, membership, etc.) and the development of appropriate external interfaces for all the pharmaceutical trading partners in the supply chain.

About The OMG

With well-established standards covering software from design, through development, to deployment and maintenance, the Object Management Group (OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration. Based on the established Object Management Architecture (OMA) and emerging Model Driven Architecture (MDA), OMG's standards cover application design and implementation. OMG's Modeling standards include the UML (Unified Modeling Language) and CWM (Common Warehouse Metamodel). CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform. OMG also issues the CORBAservices and a rapidly-growing set of industry-specific standards in vertical markets including healthcare, telecommunications, biotechnology, transportation and a dozen other areas. The OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, with an office in Tokyo, Japan as well as international marketing offices in the UK and Germany, along with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC. The OMG is a major sponsor of the Integrate 2001 trade show and conference to be held September 19-21, 2001 in New York City.

For information on joining the OMG or additional information, please contact OMG headquarters by phone at 781-444-0404, by fax at 781-444 0320, or by email at info@omg.org. The OMG provides current information and services for distributed enterprise computing on the World Wide Web at www.omg.org.