Most hospital inventory projects I have seen did not fail because the screens were ugly. They failed because the item was modeled like a retail SKU. Then the real world arrived: a case of twelve, a box of ten, an each, a lot, a serial, a UDI, an expiry, and a location that is a cabinet, a case cart, or an unlabeled drawer.

If you are building or integrating this kind of system, the data model is the product. Everything else is a view.

Start with identity. Hospitals need at least three identifiers, and they are not interchangeable. The internal item number is what purchasing and the ERP already use. The GTIN, plus the rest of the GS1 package hierarchy, is what is printed on the box. For devices, the UDI carries the device identifier plus production identifiers: lot, serial, and expiration. If you store "barcode" as a single string on the item, you cannot parse a scanned GS1 symbol into those fields, or tell a unit-of-use scan from a case scan.…