Overview
ISO/TR 14872:2025 - "Health informatics - Identification of medicinal products - Core principles for maintenance of identifiers and terms" is a Technical Report from ISO/TC 215 that defines core principles for the development, implementation and ongoing maintenance of IDMP identifiers and terminologies. The second edition (2025) documents current implementation experiences, governance models and service delivery considerations for systems and terminology support services in conformity with IDMP.
Key topics and technical requirements
This report focuses on practical, governance and operational aspects rather than prescriptive syntax. Major topics include:
- Governance and maintenance processes
- Generic governance models and service delivery practices for IDMP terminology maintenance
- Considerations for Quality Management Systems (QMS) and service level agreements (SLAs)
- Domain-specific maintenance (descriptions of existing maintenance relationships)
- Substances and Global Pharmaceutical Product Identifier (PhPID)
- Pharmaceutical dose forms, routes of administration and units (UCUM)
- Interactions with SNOMED CT, MedDRA, ATC/DDD and INN
- GS1 identifiers (GTIN, EPC) and AIDC considerations
- Terminology processes
- Creation, reconciliation, distribution and versioning of controlled vocabularies
- Emphasis on unambiguity, mapping and reconciliation when global terms differ from regional terms
- International mapping and translations
- Principles for mapping IDMP core terms to derived or regional sources
- Considerations for multilingual translations and cross-jurisdiction interoperability
- Integration with derived data sources
- How IDMP core maintenance should interface with data considered “derived” from other organizations
The report references and complements related ISO/TS specifications and international standards for health terminology and IT service management (e.g., ISO/TS 20440, ISO/TS 20451, ISO/IEC 20000-1/2, ISO/IEC 33002).
Practical applications and who uses it
ISO/TR 14872:2025 is practical for organizations implementing IDMP and those responsible for medicinal product data governance:
- Regulators and national health authorities aligning product identification and pharmacovigilance processes
- Pharmaceutical / biopharmaceutical companies managing product master data, submissions and global registrations
- Maintenance organizations and terminology providers (EDQM, UMC, Regenstrief, GS1, UCUM stewards) designing governance and distribution models
- Healthcare IT vendors, clinical research organizations (CROs) and implementers building IDMP-compliant systems, APIs and SLAs
Use cases include regulatory submissions, creation of medicinal product dictionaries, global product identification (PhPID/GSID), interoperability across EHRs and safety reporting systems.
Related standards
Keywords: ISO/TR 14872:2025, IDMP, health informatics, medicinal product identifiers, terminology maintenance, governance, PhPID, UCUM, EDQM, SNOMED, MedDRA, mapping, translations.