Health e-procurement goes live

19 December, 2008. WA Health has implemented the NEHTA e-Procurement solution developed for Australian governments’ health purchasing.

The solution was kicked off with Health Corporate Network (HCN), a shared corporate service providing human resource, finance and supply services to WA Health, and global medical products and services company, Baxter Healthcare.

Robyn Richmond, Manager Strategic Development, HCN said e-procurement was key to improving efficiencies in government health purchasing. “NEHTA’s e-procurement solution provides significant efficiencies in the sector which is also an important step in meeting the e-health requirement for unique product identifiers which impacts safety and quality outcomes in patient care,” she said.

The NEHTA e-procurement solution recommends best practice methods of transacting utilising established standards such as GS1xml messaging. It relies heavily on clean, uniquely identified, product data held in NEHTA’s National Product Catalogue (NPC). The NPC is the primary source of purchasing data for all health departments in Australia and is hosted on GS1 Australia’s GS1net.

NEHTA Chief Executive, Peter Fleming, said that the e-Procurement solution is an example of the kind of collaboration required to make e-health a reality for Australia. “It’s great to see the public and the private sector working together to achieve common goals. The e-Procurement solution will present efficiencies for all involved,” he said.

Baxter Healthcare was one of the first suppliers to populate the NPC and is now the first company to trade electronically with any state or territory using the NEHTA e-Procurement solution.

Ken Nobbs, Program Manager - Medical Products, NEHTA maintains that by using a single procurement solution for health supply purchasing, huge safety and quality improvements and cost efficiencies will be realized across the sector.

“A standardised catalogue like the NPC reduces the chance of introducing erroneous data into these transactions and the errors and costs these cause” he said “This is particularly important in the healthcare supply chain where getting the right products at the right place and time can be critical to ensuring quality patient treatment,” said Mr Nobbs.

Looking ahead HCN is now planning to work closely with other suppliers that have populated the NPC to engage in system to system transacting through the NEHTA e-Procurement solution.