Since the introduction of the National Product Catalogue (NPC) in 2007 by the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), with datapool hosting by GS1 Australia, healthcare buyers and distributors have electronic access to a central repository of accurate information about products, including medicines, medical devices and equipment.
While the opportunities and efficiency gains of electronic trading are significant, for an entity as vast as NSW Health—the nation’s biggest organisation operating within the public health sector—the move to electronic data access presented a host of operational challenges.
The Client
NSW Health—Australia’s largest public health system with 18,000 individual facilities spread across 17 local health districts and specialty networks supporting 228 public hospitals, each purchasing their own supplies using an internal catalogue of over 200,000 product lines.
The Need
A single source of trusted data
With its promise of greater supply chain efficiency, procurement standardisation, and a more accessible global market, electronic trading presented NSW Health with a number of potential and sizeable advantages. However, given the segmented nature of the business and its numerous systems, it also brought with it multiple challenges around data synchronisation, security and transparency.
Searching for technology that would enable this vast and complex organisation to operationalise supplier product, pricing and location data available via the NPC, Valentino Bulaon—HealthShare NSW’s Manager for Catalogue Services/Procurement—discovered that Bizcaps’ MCIS solution not only met this key need, but also offered other efficiencies and quality improvements.
The Solution
The ability to validate and synchronise product data with accuracy and ease
Bizcaps MCIS enables buyers and distributors in any industry to synchronise their existing systems with product, pricing and supply chain information from suppliers, published through
international GDSN datapools such as the NPC.
By eliminating the need to log into multiple datapools to extract product and pricing information, MCIS provided NSW Health with the level of data automation and customisation they required to streamline operations in this key area of the business, removing the need for inefficient manual workarounds.
As Valentino Bulaon explains, “once data is downloaded into our system, validation is automated and internal catalogue management is streamlined with MCIS’s highly customisable web-based search facility. When we first introduced our master catalogue, health professionals were unable to find some products they needed as the catalogue was based only on generic terms to comply with global standards. Now MCIS also allows them to easily search by their own descriptions, even colloquial terms, as well as supplier and NPC descriptions.”
What’s more, Bizcaps MCIS is so configurable that NSW Health was able to incorporate a product safety feature that will improve patient safety and reduce manual processing in the long term.
By providing a single source of trusted data, Bizcaps MCIS improves operational efficiencies and patient safety by:
- Reducing orders and invoice errors
- Slashing invoice claims
- Reducing out-of-stock products
- Reducing time to market for new products
- Improving medications management and product recalls
- Enhancing product authentication and the ability to track and trace products
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“MCIS directly addresses our key procurement information requirement by eliminating the need for logging into a number of datapools to extract product and pricing information. Once the data is automatically downloaded into our system, internal catalogue management is streamlined with MCIS’s highly customisable search facility.” Valentino Bulaon |
The Results
Significant cost savings, huge productivity gains
“MCIS now automatically reports back to suppliers and key NSW Health business units any product that is reported as malfunctioning,” said Valentino Bulaon. “It will also alert the Therapeutic Goods Administration where appropriate, as well as other relevant NSW Health staff.”
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“Other procurement processes that used to be done manually … such as resolving invoices on hold due to inaccurate product information, are automated. With up to $5 million of invoices on hold at any given time, MCIS will deliver enormous savings and productivity improvements.” Valentino Bulaon |
NSW Health is also using MCIS to support the convergence of internal and Government-wide procurement information, quality reporting systems and clinical evaluation registries, and the use of NPC data in other NSW Health requisitioning and procurement systems.
Bizcaps MCIS dramatically improves procurement processes and patient safety by ensuring the right products are purchased at the right price, and delivered at the right time and place.
| To learn more about how Bizcaps can transform master data management processes for your healthcare organisation, visit www.bizcaps.com/mcis-master-catalogue-information-system. |