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Australian Healthcare adopts EANnet® (March 2006)
A national catalogue of health products hosted on EANnet will replace scores of databases across the country to become the single source of information about medicines for public hospitals.
The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) is coordinating the development and rollout of the National Product Catalogue (NPC), incorporating the Australian Catalogue of Medicines (ACOM), in association with GS1 Australia.
EANnet has been selected to host the NPC, which will facilitate the exchange of clinical information about prescription and nonprescription medicines using ACOM, as well as the additional supply chain product and pricing information available on EANnet. The NPC will be used to synchronise product and pricing data between supplier and government planning systems, run price and product comparisons, conduct tenders, request quotations and undertake product research.
Until now, each Australian state and territory has had as many as 70 autonomous public health procurement centres, all maintaining and updating their own databases. Centralisation with the NPC is expected to bring significant cost savings for both the public health institutions and the companies that supply them, while the ACOM will help to reduce 'adverse events' for patients as the accuracy of product identification improves with the cleansing of data associated with EANnet.
Implementation of the NPC begins in March this year and NEHTA expects ACOM to be fully populated with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) sponsored pharmaceutical product data between June and December 2006, with the uptake of NPC completed by mid-2007.
NEHTA's high level plan of action for the first half of 2006 includes CEO briefing sessions targeting the top 200 suppliers of pharmaceutical products and medical devices in all states and territories, together with industry association briefing sessions.
The CEO briefing sessions will be followed by several rounds of NPC seminars and training sessions for public health institution representatives and suppliers.
As part of the roll-out, the TGA Sponsors of pharmaceutical products will be approached to verify their product details on the ACOM (following an upload from TGA and a stringent quality assurance process), and to start populating EANnet with data for the NPC.
This exciting initiative by NETHA is expected to save the sector $200 million by removing the need for the hundreds of public health purchasing offices across Australia to maintain their own product catalogues.
The NPC will also provide the foundation for swift product recalls and precise product tracking so that flawed, out-of-date or missing stock can be discovered and replaced before supplies become desperately short.
