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NSW Health adopts EANnet® (December 2005)
NSW Health has selected EANnet to synchronise data for its electronic purchasing system, the Health eMarketplace.
NSW Healths Procurement and GS1 Australia have begun holding briefing sessions for the 'lead vendors' among NSW Health's 6,000 trading partners, extending the reach of this already large project. The Health eMarketplace will also be integrated with the NSW Government's broader electronic procurement system, smartbuy™.
GS1 Australia's COO Mark Fuller said NSW Health's decision to use EANnet® would streamline trading for health product suppliers.
"EANnet® has become an invaluable tool for pharmaceutical and health suppliers," he said. "Many suppliers currently use EANnet® to deal with their grocery customers and now, it will power their trading with NSW Health too. Pharmaceutical suppliers will also use it to populate the Australian Catalogue of Medicines (ACOM), an initiative by the Department of Health and Ageing designed to synchronise medicine related information."
"Just one system, EANnet®, will connect pharmaceutical and health suppliers to most of their customers, reducing paperwork and the time and energy wasted correcting manual keying errors."
The NSW Health Department's Director of Procurement and Contract Services, Shane Gardner, said GS1 was a natural partner for the project.
"Already involved with smartbuy as a certified content aggregator for NSW Government's suppliers, GS1 Australia is ideally placed to integrate the NSW Health eMarketplace with smartbuy and suppliers," he said.
"GS1 Australia has been engaged at the federal health level to develop a single pharmaceutical catalogue of medicines for use nationally. This extensive piece of work and experience in working within the health industry will streamline the data synchronisation process for NSW Health and will provide pharmaceutical suppliers with a single repository for supply chain and medicines data, decreasing implementation and ongoing support effort and costs.
When Supply Chain LINK went to press, GS1 Professional Services had already worked with Health Procurement to define the data requirements needed to support the eMarketplace project. GS1 Professional Services is also assisting with the education of project staff, the integration between EANnet® and the eMarketplace, end-to-end testing, supplier engagement and roll-out.
Mark Fuller said the momentum in the health sector towards electronic trading was gathering and that GS1 Australia was working with several state health authorities.
"In the same way that it makes sense to use one barcode standard to identify goods, it makes sense to use a single data synchronisation tool like EANnet® to share product and pricing information across health systems," he said.
"There are huge administrative savings for suppliers and for customers, it means there's no need to reinvent the wheel, which equals faster, simpler and less costly implementation."
