NEHTA Home - Connecting Australia - Supply Chain

Supply Chain

Supply chain reform is critical to Australia’s eHealth journey delivering significant cost savings and efficiency gains for the healthcare industry. The NEHTA Supply Chain program oversees development of specifications and core infrastructure enabling connectivity and interoperability between electronic procurement and supply systems. These solutions include:

• National Product Catalogue (NPC) – a centralised, standardised data repository that uniquely identifies healthcare products including all medicines, medical devices, equipment and consumables. It records important supply chain and clinical information such as product components, pack sizes, Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) risk classification, Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) or RPBS notification and Prostheses Rebate Code.
  The NPC uses GS1’s standard identifier, the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), as the globally unique primary product identifier for every NPC record. Currently, more than 90% of pharmaceuticals and 50% of medical devices and consumables worldwide already have a GTIN assigned to them.
  The GTIN provides unambiguous product identification and reduces the risk of product identification errors where internal catalogue numbers may be duplicated across companies. A GTIN is assigned to all products, at all levels of packaging, that are supplied to the Australian public health sector via the NPC.
• NEHTA eProcurement solution - representing best practice in the generation of business to business supply transactions, the solution delivers national specifications for the automation and electronic exchange of core procurement messages such as purchase orders, purchase order response, dispatch advice and invoices.
• GS1Locatenet for Healthcare - a central repository enabling the exchange of location information, including Global Location Numbers (GLNs), between trading partners in the healthcare sector. Globally unique location numbers, supported by GS1 worldwide, enable standardised identification of trading entities, ship-to and ship-from locations, pricing locations and eMessaging addresses.
• Additional Supply Chain Solutions - The Supply Chain Program will continue to deliver improvements in clinical information management leading to reductions in product identification errors through the delivery of supply chain solutions for bar-coding, RFID, product recall, and product track and trace.

National commitment
All Australian governments are committed to the joint development and adoption of national eHealth standards in the supply chain as a crucial mechanism for improving patient safety and healthcare quality. This commitment is described in the Jurisdictional Position Statement which was agreed in 2010 between Commonwealth, State and Territory health departments. Jurisdictions are now progressively implementing electronic supply chain solutions based on evolving national standards.

Benefits
An accurate and efficient electronically-enabled network offers major advantages for purchasers, suppliers and consumers such as:

• Current, accurate product data.
• Secure pricing information available only to nominated trading partners.
• Standardised identifiers for precise product tracking and swift recall.
• Ensuring reliable continuity of supply with minimum inventory investment.
• Improving market visibility and significantly reducing the time and cost of introducing new products.
• Removing inefficient paper-based forms and automating the efficient distribution of product information.
• Reducing order errors and the supply costs associated with invoice reconciliations, credit claims, returns and refused deliveries.

Contact
For more information visit the NEHTA Supply Chain website or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .