Potential drug identifier conflicts (as a result of dropping leading zeros used in DINs)

I have checked with our DIS technical support and the vendor. Our system has no issue with "00770088" vs "770088" as it does not drop zeroes when DINS are submitted. It also validates against our DIN table which uses 8 digits instead of 6. The only potential issue we can see if it data extracts were created for analysis purposes using Excel, where we may run into issues with leading zeroes being dropped.

This applies to our DIS, so you may want to ask the question of pharmacy practice management system vendors and EMR vendors to get their take on it.

I would argue that the POS systems should modify their code to not drop leading zeros. If the CCDD is transmitted as an integer, dropping leading zeros is ok. However, dropping leading zeros from a string is a bug on their part - they are essentially corrupting data.

I can't speak for any particular jurisdiction, but I do know the some of the point of service vendors (EMR, PMS) will drop leading zeros from DINs.

Will this have the potential to cause problems with NTP-CCDD identifiers as well, as they all start with a 9 rather than a 7?

Hi
In our CCDD call yesterday we had a discussion with those present. I wanted to reach out to get additional input. The topic was:
1. Discuss the identifiers used for Manufactured Product CCDD concepts
• The following identifier pattern has been used “7xxxxx” (6 digits and identifiers currently start with a “7”)
• It has come to our attention that in the past there have been DINs (now inactive) such as “00700088” that may conflict with a CCDD identifier of “700088” used in stakeholder systems.
i. There are concerns that stakeholders sometimes drop the leading zeros which would definitely result in a conflict.

We would like to assess how big a problem this may be. There fore would like your input to - "Are you aware of issues with stakeholders inadvertently dropping leading zeros (sometimes excel does this if not formatted correctly) in your jurisdiction?" I must acknowledge we can not change the existing DIN numbers that start with a leading zero. We want to deal with the new codes we have assigned that use this pattern “7xxxxx”

thankyou to those who provided input on the call.

Beverly