Healthcare professionals, particularly prescribers and dispensers, often encounter challenges in ensuring continuity of treatment or safely providing additional medication to patients who obtained their medicines in another country. This arises due to the national licensing and marketing of medicinal products, leading to variations in product names, packaging, and formulations across borders. Identifying equivalent products becomes error-prone, posing risks to patient safety. The ISO IDMP standards address this by providing globally unique identifiers for medicinal products and ensuring consistent representation of product details in computable formats. Implementation of IDMP facilitates reliable cross-border product lookup, enabling professionals to match foreign medicines with safe equivalents in their own country, support additional supplies or prescriptions, and accurately report adverse events.

Recognizing that most healthcare professionals do not require in-depth knowledge of IDMP, this online course is structured to cater to different professional needs. Basic modules cover understanding cross-border product information, IDMP fundamentals, and common scenarios like product substitution. Additional modules offer insights into product information flow across ecosystems, relevant for research, clinical trial participation, and teaching. Advanced modules delve into medicinal product specifications, pertinent for real-world data research. This approach ensures professionals grasp the importance of an integrated healthcare ecosystem while providing tailored education based on their roles and interests.


Understanding the importance of the accurate global identification of medicinal products

This module focuses on the accurate global identification of medicines. It provides an overview of the reasons why IDMP is needed, what the standards contain and how patients and health and care professionals can benefit from its wide scale use. It is intended to be applicable to all health and care professionals, especially prescribers and dispensers of medicinal products (i.e. mostly to doctors and pharmacists).

Understanding the uses and flows of medicinal product information

This module goes into more detail about the information flows of medicinal product information across the health and care ecosystem, including to and from medicines regulators. It is likely to be relevant to professionals with an interest in clinical and medicines information, the way in which it is communicated to support cross-border patient flows and the accurate identification of medicines in other countries. It may be of relevance to professionals who experience a high volume of cross-border patient flows themselves, those who have an interest in teaching or research relating to good practices in the use of medicines, including clinical guideline developers.

Understanding the representation of medicinal product information

This module takes a more detailed look at the representation of medicines information, in particular dose form and strength, and how a global identifier for pharmaceutical products can be consistently defined. It also examines the challenges of accurate medicine identification within Individual Case Safety Reports (ICSRs), and the importance of achieving and integrated workflow for the reporting of adverse events. Professionals with an interest in real world data research including medicinal product information, and in pharmacovigilance, are likely to find these last three modules useful.