Health Purchasing Victoria (HPV) was established in 2001 to improve the collective purchasing power of Victorian hospitals and health services. Managing more than 40 contract categories, from clinical, indirect materials and services and equipment, HPV helps public health care services deliver high quality patient care by ensuring they have a reliable and agile supply chain (www.healthsharevic.org.au).

The Victorian Product Catalogue System (VPCS) is a key piece of HPV’s procurement infrastructure. It draws its information from data published to HPV on the National Product Catalogue (NPC).

HPV engaged Bizcaps Software to develop the VPCS. As their recipient technology partner and NPC product information publishing specialist for Health and Food suppliers, Bizcaps has both sides covered.

The VPCS is:

  • Available to all Victorian public hospitals and health services with secure access to HPV contracts
  • The central common catalogue for product and pricing information
  • Maintained by HPV’s Supply Chain Information Team. They work with supplier data published to HPV to ensure negotiated product and pricing information in the VPCS is correct and complete.

As the Victorian health sector embarks on supply chain reform, the VPCS is crucial to ensuring that health product and pricing data is streamlined. The VPCS also plays an important role in supporting health services to make procurement decisions more easily through having central access to product and pricing data.

5 ways health services like to use the VPCS and your product information:

1. Searching and filtering to find what they are after
2. Creating “favourite” views
3. Side-by-side comparison of items, including product information supplied during the tender process
4. Visibility of complex pricing models
5. Visibility of NPC product data detail and attributes