Healthcare Item Data Lake FAQs

The Healthcare Item Data Lake is a searchable repository where Healthcare Sector Ready Data Providers can share information about their products with eligible Data Requestors

The Healthcare Item Data Lake is specifically designed to improve access to product data for the Healthcare sector that is published within the National Product Catalogue. 

The Healthcare Item Data Lake will allow all publicly available product records to be searchable and accessible to all Requestors who register for this new form of access within the NPC. This removes the limitation of only having access to those products published directly to them.

Publishing your data will deliver the following benefits for Healthcare Data Providers:

• Maximum visibility for your products: Expand access to your item data across the widest audience with existing and potential trading partners.
• Maximum value from your NPC investment: No limitations to who can see your product data, whilst maintaining important security controls.
• Data Requirements consistent with the local industry: No special activities required to make data available.
• Simplify Publication of data: where only item data (i.e. no pricing) is required by your trading partners, you may only need to publish via the Healthcare Item Data Lake.

The Healthcare Item Data Lake is a single “industry place”- to publish your item data to, so that any approved and registered NPC Data Recipients can easily access you Healthcare Item Data (ie “product data”) without you having to continually publish to extra recipients. 

No, think of this as an additional 1-step process that makes your data available to a whole new market of end users.  The traditional NPC Healthcare Ready process, which involves publishing all your product and price data to specific trading partners, allows that company to fully integrate all your published data, including prices and recipient-specific items data values. However, the Healthcare Item Data Lake contains no pricing and is being used more for “instant product queries” rather than full data synchronization.

It’s simple. The Healthcare Item Data Lake is just another “NPC Data Recipient” you publish your data to from the NPC. To help with getting your existing data into the Lake, GS1 has reached out to all Healthcare Data Providers with the option to opt in or opt out of the new service.  Unless you have specifically opted out from publishing your item data, GS1 Australia will publish your Healthcare items to the Healthcare Lake from 1 July 2023.

If you want to manually publish content yourself, the NPC Recipient to publish your data to is “Healthcare Item Data Lake (Recipient GLN 9312345550425)”. Ongoing you should continue to publish any new items.

No, it is totally optional, but if you think of the objective, you want your trading partners or other healthcare participants to have your most accurate and up-to-date product data. There’s no access to commercially sensitive pricing or any recipient-specific values, it’s just your neutral item data. You really need everyone in your value chain to be using the correct product information.  We can’t think of why suppliers wouldn’t want to get greater value from their NPC subscription by participating in this initiative.

No, so long as you are a registered NPC user, there are no additional fees for simply publishing your product data to the Healthcare Item Data Lake.

Most importantly, Pricing data in NPC is only ever published to the intended Recipient you have entered pricing for. Recipients do not need any pricing data so you should not enter any pricing. Regardless of whether you do, the Healthcare Item Data Lake only receives Item files, so we can assure you no pricing data is stored or accessible.

Only your neutral item data is published, i.e., no recipient-specific values you may have entered for item data fields are not published.  Additionally, only items passed their Community Visibility Date will be able to be retrieved by Requestors.  If an item has a future dated Community Visibility Date, that item will not be able to be retrieved, even if published to the Healthcare Item Data Lake, until the Community Visibility date becomes current or in the past.

Currently only text data is stored, no images are stored or retrieved.

This is not a standard function, although a list of the parties who have requested your data can be provided on request. Please keep in mind though that only items past their Community Visibility Date are available.  If the Community Visibility Date is in the future, the item cannot be retrieved from the Healthcare Item Data Lake, even if the item has been published.

If this occurs, you can UN-publish the product which will render it no longer accessible in the Healthcare Item Data Lake. Reach out to the NPC Support team if you need assistance.

Companies approved by GS1 Australia to use the Healthcare Item Data Lake to extract data are referred to as Healthcare Requestors.

To be eligible to become a Healthcare Requestor, your organisation must be a fully registered and financial NPC Data Recipient Subscriber.

To qualify as a Healthcare Requester, the organisation must be a fully registered and financial NPC Data Recipient. To be approved, a Healthcare Requester must additionally be one of the following:

(a)   Federal, State or Territory Health Department or their related agencies;
(b)   Private and public hospitals/clinics;
(c)   Recognised healthcare product distributors or buying groups;
(d)   Pharmacy chains or pharmacy buying groups;
(e)   Recognised aged care providers;
(f)    Recognised Healthcare solution providers* who provide value added services based on the data; or
(g)   Any other healthcare product buying groups.

*A solution provider must either be a fully registered Data Recipient, or acting on behalf of their Data Recipient client, with the sole purpose of requesting the content for the end-use only by the Data Recipient.

It cannot be accessed via a browser as it is a “data lake”, which is an IT term to denote a data repository with the potential to store a large amount of data. Approved Requestors can access this “lake” using “API Request Messages”.  These are standard format Application Programming Interface documents published by GS1 Australia. They define how to retrieve data from the Healthcare Item Data Lake using API requests.  You will need to involve your IT teams to facilitate this process, as it requires special “API software” at your end to generate and send such messages, as well as to receive and process the results.

As a Requestor you must already be a fully registered and financial NPC Data Recipient Subscriber. This will avail you of one API credential to use for data retrieval using your own API software. There is a small fee associated with any subsequent API credentials you may require. 

The API Request Messages are structured in such a way that the Requestor can search the Lake using the keys, GTIN, GLN, Company Name, category (UNSPSC), Brand (eg:3M), ARTG, AMTCTPP, PRC, Supplier Assigned IDs and keyword searches across Brand, Functional Name and Non-Food Ingredient Name.

It’s actually a different use case if you are creating 1:1 subscriptions in NPC with individual suppliers who have been made Healthcare Ready for a specific trading partner.  In this case the specific subscription in NPC (as opposed to the Lake) will provide you with the product pricing and other items which may not have a Community Visibility date, or specific trading partner dependent values for some item data fields.

We would imagine that for some recipients, the use of the Lake is in addition to full master data synchronisation.  For other non-previously implemented NPC Recipients, the Lake may provide a good starting point without having to have a list of specific suppliers publishing to you directly.

Publication of product data from suppliers into the Lake has commenced and will continue. As of late June 2023 there are over 120,000 GTINs in the Lake. By late December 2023, the expectation is to have added another 135,000 GTINs.

The current (as at June 2023) total number of Healthcare items (at all packaging levels) in the NPC is 471,591 - almost half a million items. Suppliers should be publishing all and any non-private label items, so the content in the Lake is destined to vastly increase as this occurs. GS1 Australia is assisting product suppliers with this exercise and encouraging their ongoing publication of product data as new products come onto the market.

The data model (commonly known as the Healthcare Industry data model) is a set of data attributes required to fulfill recipients’ data requirements around pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices when submitting product information to the Healthcare Item Data Lake. Data attributes about a product can include details such as ARTG ID, AMTCTPP, Protheses Rebate Codes and TGA related information. The data model can be found in the NPC Cookbook: https://www.gs1au.org/download/GS1au-cookbook-npc-data-requirements.xls/file

The Healthcare Item Data Lake is an extension of the industry-endorsed National Product Catalogue for Healthcare. It contains trusted data provided directly from the product supplier compliant to the data model and validations signed off by the industry’s governance process and facilitated by GS1 Australia.

The Healthcare Item Data Lake is a sector solution supported by public / private sector data recipients as well as brand owners and distributors. All current healthcare data recipients will have access to the Healthcare Item data lake (via API) by virtue of being an NPC data recipient. To see the full list of recipients please click here: Australian Healthcare Data Recipients - GS1 Australia

The Healthcare Item Data Lake uses Okta to manage and secure user authentication to access the API. To access the API endpoints, a requestor must be authenticated via Okta which returns a unique authorisation token per session. For each API endpoint, the authorisation token must be submitted with the API request to retrieve product data. The Healthcare Item Data Lake has passed vigorous testing to ensure the security is intact and not easily accessible by users without authorisation from GS1 Australia.

GS1 support a variety of use cases developed in conjunction with healthcare data recipients, these can be accessed here:  Use cases - GS1 Australia

The two have different uses.  The BETA system is for limited testing purposes. It contains some test data (not real production data) and may occasionally be offline/down without warning, as it is not maintained to any service levels / availability schedules. Having said that, it can be useful if you just want to check your API connection and receive some data before using the Production system.

For more comprehensive testing, we recommend moving to the HIDL Production system. It contains real data in much greater quantities than BETA and is growing all the time. The Production data is much more comprehensive (more items, more attributes) and so for any integration programmes you may have, it would be the preferrable platform to use to test your ability to process real content. Of course, you may choose to feed the HIDL Production content into your own test systems before exposing them to your live environment.

No, they are different credentials. Our suggestion is you register for both the Beta and Production systems, performing your initial API testing using the BETA platform which has a range of test data already loaded for this purpose.  Once you are happy your API testing has worked, you can then use the Production API credentials you are provided to start calling content from the Production system.

Unless you have cancelled your access for some reason or we have communicated your access is no longer valid for some reason, it will remain active. 

By default, search results will return all matching items, including items flagged as "interim" or "distributor" items. This is new functionality being developed for NPC.  

Interim items are those whose current data is minimal, later to be fully completed once the product is closer to being available on the market. The intention is to give visibility of products early in their lifecycles, even before all supply chain data is available.  

Distributor items are items that have been published to the HIDL by a distributor, rather than the product sponsor or brand owner. The same GTIN may be published by both the product sponsor and a distributor, but the distributor publishes a subset of data I.e., only the data they control. You may not want to see repeated records for the same item so you can filter these out. However, you may want to see who distributes the item, as well as the full item data record from the brand owner/sponsor.