NEHTA Home - Connecting Australia - Supply Chain

Supply Chain

An electronically interconnected health environment provides an opportunity for the public health sector to make significant efficiency gains and cost savings, particularly in the area of Supply Chain reform. To this end, NEHTA has established various solutions to meet the needs of the industry. These Supply Chain solutions are:

• The National Product Catalogue (NPC), a central source of data for the accurate identification of healthcare products in both supply chain and clinical applications within health departments in each State and Territory. The NPC uniquely identifies each healthcare product (for example medicines and medical devices) and records information such as risk classification and pack size - reducing significantly the number of products incorrectly ordered because of identification errors, which potentially delays patient treatment.
• The NEHTA e-procurement solution specifies the best practice in the electronic generation of business to business transactions. This includes the automation of the fundamental procurement functions such as purchase orders, purchase order response, dispatch advice and invoice messages.
• Business Intelligence Tools are systems that provide a mechanism to collect, summarise and present supply chain data for the purpose of streamlining the procurement process and realizing the benefits of electronic trading.

The benefits these solutions will provide to the healthcare sector are:

• Providing clean, accurate product data to use e-health systems (medicines prescribing and dispensing systems)
• Ensuring pricing information is secure and only available to nominated trading partners
• Standardised identifiers for products allowing for swift product recalls and precise product tracking
• Decreasing the risk of a hospital running out of stock, while reducing the amount of hospitals' working capital tied up in ‘safety' stocks
• Significantly reducing the time and costs associated with introducing new products onto the market, while improving product visibility across Australia’s largest healthcare buyers
• Removing the need for each purchasing office and supplier to use inefficient paper-based purchasing forms and product specification sheets - information can be automatically updated for all current and potential customers, with a simple upload
• Suppliers can reduce costs associated with processing invoice reconciliations, credit claims, returns and refused deliveries, because of the reduced rate of ordering errors

Healthcare Supply Chain and Patient Safety

The Federal, State and Territory health departments have made a commitment to the collaborative development and adoption of national e-health standards in healthcare supply chain. A position statement released in relation to this can be read here.

Contact
Ken Nobbs, Program  Manager, Medical Products - This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it