As of June 2025, we have updated our nomenclature assignment service to assist you in finding the appropriate European Medical Device Nomenclature (EMDN) codes for your devices based on your existing GMDN Code.
How does it work?
Once you have your GMDN Code for your device:
- Go to the Term details page to see the EMDN section, where you will find a “recommended” EMDN code. This is based on the closest match.
- If you click on the EMDN code hyperlink, this takes you to the location of that EMDN code in the EMDN tree
- If you find a more suitable EMDN code within the tree (e.g., an adjacent term), you can copy this code and paste it into the “Custom” section on the Term details page.
- To get a download of all your GMDN and EMDN Terms, go to My Terms and “EMDN”. Here you will see the “recommended” EMDN codes, unless you have entered a “custom” EMDN code in which case the “custom” EMDN code is what is seen in the download.
To get the best out of this service, an accurate GMDN Term assignment is essential. You can watch our GMDN Quality Term Assignment video on our training page here.
Remember: A medical device should be assigned a single GMDN Terms that accurately represents that device. A component or accessory of a system or parent device should not be assigned to the GMDN Term for the system.
EMDN terms: We provide a service which is intended to provide the closest match for your GMDN Term in the EMDN database (Copyright in the European Medical Device Nomenclature (‘EMDN’) is owned by the European Union and the EMDN materials are used under the European Union’s Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. We have developed this service to help you identify the EMDN term that we believe is the most appropriate to match your selected GMDN Term. A full set of EMDN Terms can be downloaded from the European Commission website: https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/dyna2/emdn/
PLEASE NOTE however that, for the following reasons, the GMDN Agency has no responsibility or liability to you for use of any EMDN term that is identified by this service – it remains your responsibility to ensure you use the most appropriate EMDN term for the relevant medical device. EMDN terms are drafted more widely than GMDN Terms, so one EMDN term is likely to cover numerous types of medical device, and products falling within different GMDN Terms may be covered by the same EMDN term. Accordingly, as there are a significantly higher number of GMDN Terms in the GMDN Database than there are terms in the EMDN Database, it will not always be possible to map one GMDN Term onto a single corresponding EMDN term: more likely your specific GMDN Term will be matched to the closest, more general EMDN term, which may cover a number of different GMDN Terms. For further assistance please contact the GMDN Agency.