Introduction
The ‘single source’ of item master data for health institutions in Australia, the National Product Catalogue (NPC), has been used successfully by one of the state health jurisdictions to improve the quality of data sourced for its pharmaceutical tendering process.

In 2009 Health Purchasing Victoria (HPV) requested suppliers who wished to tender to supply pharmaceutical products, to provide tender data in the format of the NPC Browser Template. For current NPC users this provided a simplified process for tender submission. For HPV, this resulted in a 60% improvement in data matching with items from the current contract. The NPC is an initiative of the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) and hosted on GS1net, GS1 Australia’s data synchronisation service.

The National Product Catalogue
In consultation with the Australian states and territories, as well as the federal government, NEHTA initiated the National Product Catalogue (NPC) as the ‘single source’ of item master data for health institutions seeking to purchase medicines, medical devices and other necessary healthcare items. The NPC, which has been endorsed by all state, territory and federal health departments in Australia, is a single repository of product, pricing and healthcare data for all health industry product categories for the purpose of data synchronisation. These categories include pharmaceuticals and medical devices (such as orthopedics, implants, dental products, etc.).

The NPC is hosted by GS1 Australia on GS1net, a GDSN-certified data pool used in Australia and New Zealand by more than 1,400 companies across a number of industry sectors. This platform enables the secure sharing of item master information such as product identifiers and descriptions, units of measure, package contents, product classification, pricing and related healthcare information.

For suppliers in the Australian healthcare sector to become ‘NPC Ready’, all of their product and price data must be loaded to the NPC, the data validated, and published to the NPC data recipients (i.e., health jurisdictions and private healthcare organisations). Some organisations take a phased approach and achieve NPC Populated status as they load segments of their product range. The validation step in the process, performed by GS1 Australia, is crucial as it ensures the quality of the data provided which will assist all jurisdictions such as Victoria to overcome difficulties in validating tender outcomes.

To download and read a copy of the full article please right click on the attachment below. Other reference files include:
Australian National Product Catalogue Leaflet

ATTACHMENTS (Click on the filename to download):

Australian National Product Catalogue used for Healthcare Procurement