Medi-Span Generic Product Identifier (GPI)

The Medi-Span Generic Product Identifier, or GPI, is a proprietary, 14-character, hierarchical therapeutic classification system. It provides a consistent structure for organizing, grouping, comparing, searching, matching, mapping, and screening medication products at different levels of specificity.

Unlike other leading drug data and medication intelligence solutions that assign drug products a static number, the GPI’s characters mean something:

• The 14-character value structure allows for the creation of complex drug lists with the user’s desired level of granularity.
• It ties to the Medi-Span proprietary generic product packaging code (GPPC) to help with purchasing decisions.
• After decades of development, it is considered the standard within healthcare IT.
• Ongoing surveillance of industry data allows us to regularly update GPIs to reflect the changing healthcare landscape.

So, what does this mean for you? Simply put, specificity and speed.

The Medi-Span GPI:

• Can group identical, similar (same ingredient, different “sigs”), or unique drugs for medication reconciliation.
• Impacts the specificity of clinical screening by taking into account contraindications specific to dosage form or route of administration.
• Supports formulary development and maintenance.
• Maps to NDCs, UPCs, and HRIs to support interoperability and information exchange.
• Enables automated NDC inclusion/ exclusion without ongoing, routine maintenance.
• Helps standardize drug lists to address problems created by different medication spellings and lexicons submitted from differing providers, pharmacies, and payers, simplifying comparisons.

The hierarchical structure allows organizations to use different levels of the GPI depending on the required degree of medication specificity. Users can group broad therapeutic categories or use all 14 characters to identify more specific drug products, including distinctions involving ingredients, strength, dosage form, and route of administration.

The GPI breaks down into seven two-character pairs (couplets) to show how a drug fits into medical categories:

• Drug Group (Characters 1–2): Broad therapeutic class (e.g., cardiovascular, central nervous system)
• Drug Class (Characters 3–4): Specific medical category
• Drug Subclass (Characters 5–6): More refined subclass
• Drug Base Name (Characters 7–8): Core chemical entity or base name
• Drug Name (Characters 9–10): Specific drug name or salt form
• Dose Form (Characters 11–12): Delivery method (e.g., tablet, capsule, injection)
• Dose Strength (Characters 13–14): Specific potency or strength

Ongoing surveillance of industry data allows Medi-Span to regularly update GPIs to reflect the changing healthcare landscape. Updates may be implemented to reflect new dosage forms, technologies, and therapeutic classifications. GPI changes will be indicated as “NEW” within data files.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers use the GPI to collect and analyze real-world evidence on how a drug or drug class performs, review population health data, and better understand costs.

Retail pharmacies use all 14 characters of the GPI to identify and process exact medication orders. For example, pharmacists can identify any available brand and generic options for a medication prescribed as a 10 mg tablet.

PBMs and payers use the GPI to develop formularies and determine co-pay tiers. Its hierarchical structure provides flexibility to include or exclude drugs from different tiers based on factors such as drug class, formulation, or individual ingredients.

Analytics firms and consultants use the GPI to analyze patient and medication trends, such as identifying patients taking ACE inhibitors along with at least one other prescription drug.