HIBCC

The Health Industry Business Communications Council (HIBCC), based in Phoenix, Arizona, is the primary standard-setting and educational organization for the health care industry. HIBCC was established in 1983 by a consortium of major health care associations to develop standards for data transfer and information exchange by using barcode labeling to improve patient safety and increase efficiency. It is accredited by both the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). It is also an accredited issuing agency for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unique device identifier (UDI) program.

HIBCC developed the Health Industry Bar Code (HIBC) standard. Currently, HIBCC administers and maintains five standards that are related to automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) in addition to the following systems:

• The Health Industry Number (HIN) system

• The Labeler Identification Code (LIC) system

• The Universal Product Number (UPN) system

HIN

The HIN identifies trading partners, including specific health care facilities and locations within them, throughout the health care supply chain. It is a randomly assigned, nine-character, alphanumeric identifier.

LIC

The LIC identifies individual device manufacturers. It can be used across multiple product lines. Manufacturers in the LIC database can create identifiers at multiple packaging levels by using the HIBC Supplier Labeling Standard.

UPN

The UPN identifies medical and surgical products. It can use either the HIBC format (a variable-length alphanumeric code) or the European Article Number (EAN) format as standardized as a GS1 Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), which is a fixed-length numeric-only code.

For more information, refer to http://www.hibcc.org/.