I believe that particular statement is part of a communication from MITA (MITAHealth.org) to FDA, representing MITA's goals regarding UDI. As a child-organization of CMMS tasked with decreasing CMMS's reimbursement costs via information-technology initiatives, it's natural that MITA would be an advocate of UDI. There are some clear mission differences between CMMS and FDA, though.
We do know that GHTF, which has participation by some of the FDA's more regulatory-activist senior device personnel, is thinking about UDI. But, there are a number of conflicts between the MITA proposal and what might be desired in nations with different regulatory-policy legal bases and ISO 13485-related regulatory systems. As far as I know, it remains a core goal of UDI that it be Universal, therefore all of the GHTF participants would have to sign off on a UDI implementation before it could go forward. I'd think that would entail UDI bumping into the same regulatory-mission-differentials that have caused the FDA to not actually make much progress toward harmonization so far.
Certainly no system will be implemented calling for mandatory utilization of the GMDN system until such access is legally freely available. And, I'm not aware that any work has started on resolving what might be significant disruptions for manufacturers who have based legacy device regulatory-stance decisions on the FDA's existing product code system if a new classification system were introduced.
I'm not aware that the FDA has directly acted to "start the ball rolling" regarding UDI adoption. There are many stakeholders other than MITA who would be expected to have input. As far as I know, the FDA itself has not asked for comments yet, or given an indication that it has a specific timetable or agenda for any such introduction. If I'm wrong on that and there is a specific FDA action pending, I'd like to know about it.