The following release appeared from NEHTA appeared a few days ago.
Ramsay Health Care signs up to the National Product Catalogue
4 June, 2009. Australia’s largest private hospital group Ramsay Health Care has committed to a national approach to eHealth supply chain reform by signing up to NEHTA’s National Product Catalogue (NPC).
Australia’s largest private hospital group Ramsay Health Care has committed to a national approach to eHealth supply chain reform by signing up to NEHTA’s National Product Catalogue (NPC).
NEHTA recognises that there is significant safety, quality and cost benefits for the health sector by using a single product catalogue for health.
In line with NEHTA’s goal to identify and foster the development of the right technology necessary to deliver the best e-health system in Australia, the signing of Ramsay Health Care is part of a strategic effort to support collaboration with the private sector and is a significant step towards achieving widespread e-health take-up.
NEHTA’s NPC uniquely identifies healthcare products, including medicines and medical devices and equipment, and records important supply chain and clinical information about those products such as the components of products and pack sizes. NEHTA’s objective is that the NPC will be the primary source of data for all health related purchasing in Australia.
As a standardised catalogue the NPC reduces the chance of introducing erroneous data into procurement transactions and the errors and costs these cause. This is particularly important in the healthcare supply chain where getting the right products at the right place and time can be critical to ensuring quality patient treatment.
“Ramsay Health Care will benefit greatly from using NPC because many of our vendors are already posting to the NPC. The standards implemented in the NPC will eliminate problems we have had in the past with getting product information in an agreed and standardised format, and provide accuracy improvements throughout our supply chain,” said Andrew Potter Group Inventory Manager Ramsay Health Care.
Ken Nobbs, Program Manager - Medical Products NEHTA said that the NPC is an example of the kind of collaboration required to make e-health a reality for Australia. “It’s great to now see both the public and the private sector coming on board to work together to achieve common goals,” he said.
Australia is one of the first countries in the world to develop a single, national product catalogue.
Looking ahead Ramsay Health Care is planning to work closely with their suppliers to ensure their full and comprehensive population of NEHTA’s NPC as Ramsay’s primary data source for procurement purposes.
Over the coming months NEHTA expects the uptake of the NPC to increase as other healthcare organisations and suppliers come on board.
For more information contact Alison Sweeney Media Coordinator 02 8298 2669 alison.sweeney-at -nehta.gov.au
End Release.
This is really quite an odd release from NEHTA. While not sure I imagine Ramsay is hoping to leverage some of the pricing and volume discounts that are available to the public sector and to enhance the reliability of the information used by their e-commerce platform. Both worthy objectives. (A good plan if it can work and certainly I support it – given I have a few shares!)
The odd things are that this is the first occasion I am aware of where a major private hospital chain has had much to do with NEHTA. Even more certain is that to date the private hospital sector has hardly been a focus of NEHTA’s activity.
Also of some worry that it is now virtually 2 years past the NEHTA self imposed deadline (July 1, 2007) for the NPC to be fully populated with supplier data – having had a year’s notice of that deadline – and the release mentions they are still waiting for people to come on board.
More amusing is that when the manager of the area says at a recent conference. The benefits of the NPC seem a trifle speculative and to not yet be actually in place after all this time. (The NPC was on the original 2004/5 work plan!)
It does seem that a good time was had by all in Vienna however.
See:
http://www.gs1.org/healthcare/news_events/170309/
The contents of the presentation were pretty exciting (to quote the GS1 Newsletter):
Australia – a world leader in Healthcare
“We treat a lot of people, we spend a lot of money and we get excellent results,” said Ken Nobbs, Programme Manager Medical Products, National eHealth Transition Authorities (NeHTA) of Australia, “but despite the current successes, there are opportunities to improve through the use of technology. IT expenditure in Healthcare is 1.4% compared with the finance sector which reaches 7-9%.” NeHTA aims to develop better ways of electronically collecting and securely exchanging health information and facilitate eHealth systems that unlock; quality, safety and efficiency benefits.
Data synchronisation is core to improvements in eHealth. One health jurisdiction in Australia has estimated that the cost of cataloguing a new item in a hospital system costs AU$47 an hour per record, or AU$470,000 for a standard health catalogue (about 10,000 items), excluding data maintenance time. Bad data is also costly; for example, one supplier calculated that 47% of all pricing errors in purchase orders result from public hospital data errors and cost AU$40,000 per year. “Lack of data synchronisation leads to an unnecessary replication of effort and errors leading to quality and cost issues in Healthcare,” concluded Ken Nobbs. NeHTA has worked with GS1 Australia to develop the National Product Catalogue (NPC), hosted on GS1net, GS1 Australia’s GDSN-certified data pool.
See:
http://www.gs1.org/sites/default/files/docs/healthcare/GS1_Healthcare_Newsletter_14_apr_2009.pdf
I find it hard to see what is news in any of this.
For myself I would like to see less travelling and more efforts in the implementation.
It would be also very useful if NEHTA would provide some information on just what proportion of purchasing was now being done using NPC data so actual adoption could be assessed.
Insiders are suggesting that most suppliers are being pretty selective with what is being placed in the catalogue (only high volume expensive items that are obtained by tender) because of the onerous nature of populating the 170 data fields for each entry. (That is obviously a ridiculous number of data fields per item!)
Insiders also say that the information held in the NPC is ‘essentially useless’ at present. Makes one wonder if Ramsay’s announcement at this stage is just to cover the possibility that some time in the future value may be available from it.
There are also issues around the virtually zero adoption in the SME sector and the need to do double entry of some items into both TGA and NPC databases.
At absolute best this is still a work in very early stages of progress – hence the sort of presentation in Vienna cited above.
David.
3 comments:
You referred to the “onerous nature of populating the 170 data fields for each entry” which you described as an “obviously a ridiculous number of data fields per item!”
What you are describing here is as a consequence of the perpetuation of the NEHTA PhD culture. If you dug deeper to ascertain how many suppliers, products and medicines are now loaded onto the database and which organisations are now routinely accessing the database you would be disappointed, but not surprised, by the results.
Your readers need to understand that the PhD - Perfect Health Data - culture inevitably leads to a constant state of “its not quite right yet” mentality, which in turn leads to “more research is required”.
In effect because NEHTA and its people are not health system IMPLEMENTERS they end up implementing nothing, but instead continue striving to achieve the Perfect Health Data nirvana from their ivory towers.
With over 250 people in NEHTA beavering away now for ?? how many years ?? the writing is there for all to see.
David,
I understand Ramsay are preparing to roll out a consolidated SAP implementation to integrate the financial, inventory and supply chain aspects of their operations. I believe they currently have quite a few disconnected systems for these roles across the various private hospitals they've acquired. Plus, they have growing international operations.
I suspect the announcement of their uptake of the NPC will fit into that implementation project, which is good news, I guess. Because NSW Health are hoping to integrate with NPC (I believe that project started late last year but haven't seen a progress report), it makes sense for Ramsay to take advantage of it.
Somehow I doubt the rhetoric that "Looking ahead Ramsay Health Care is planning to work closely with their suppliers to ensure their full and comprehensive population of NEHTA’s NPC as Ramsay’s primary data source for procurement purposes." Ummm, dubious, I think.
What strikes me as amazing though is not the contents of this press release, but the fact that this is the first press release from NEHTA in 3 months. Considering Peter Fleming and the Nehtian chorus proudly trumpeted this year as the "YEAR OF DELIVERY", I'm still waiting to see even of the slightest glimmer of that actually happening. We're half way through the "Year of Delivery", and the best that NEHTA can offer is that 'at some point in the future, one of the private healthcare companies will use a product catalog to support their e-procurement and supply chain efficiency goals". Nothing to do with better patient care, reducing adverse events and all those other less important aspects of eHealth that actually involve patients and doctors.
Wow, that's impressive delivery.
(But, as an aside for a little light humour:
How many Nehtians does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two hundred and fifty. One to change the bulb, 98 to go on an important fact-finding mission abroad to see how it's done, and 1 to write the press release.
How many Nehtians does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. They just declare darkness the new standard.
How many Nehtians does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. A Nehtian would recommend replacing the light fixture.
How many Nehtians does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. Nehtians aren't expected to know how to do anything; they can just tell you how you should do it.
How many Nehtians does it take to change a lightbulb?
That's difficult to say. First, we need to
•do a major study to see if you really need light in that area,
•determine historically why the light burned out, and
•an analysis to determine whether it's the right kind of light anyway.
•Then, maybe, we can recommend appropriate action,
•however, we may need an additional study to determine the light sensitivity of employees visiting the area.
•After that, we can: develop RFPs and RFQs,
•evaluate the abilities of various maintenance workers to perform the task,
•recommend personnel selection, and
•supervise the activity.
What continually amazes me, apart from the obvious waste of money that NEHTA has become, (and probably despite the best efforts of its current leadership to right a sinking ship) is how it continues to be allowed to exist in its current form.
We are surely months away from announcing its 'restructure' and I can only hope that the new implementation entity pushes NEHTA to one side and builds from scratch, as importing the current NEHTA culture and mindset into a new organisation is a toxic legacy.
Yes we do need national standards to support the sector and help industry and we do need an organisation like NEHTA to do the job - but somewhere in its implementation we got an organisation that is both letting the ehealth sector down, as well as giving the sector a bad name.
Lets be very clear about this - governments dont like to invest in risky enterprises, and do like to invest in sure things. So, NEHTA does us a double disservice of both failing in its primary task, as well as reducing the willingness of government to further invest in crucial health system reform.
I think David's comments about what might be found if an audit was conducted of NEHTA consultancies is prescient - and worrying. The same might be said for many of its internal projects. A canny reporter might do a lot of damage if they could access this information.
The noises coming from Canada in David's article are probably another symptom of the same fundamental problem - that the people tasked to run these organisations do not have strong prior eHealth track records, and until they pop up, are unknown to the community. In the US the leaders for Obama's e-Health push are all well known and largely respected members of the informatics community. Here, NEHTA does not even consult with our experts, as far as I have seen, let alone embrace them and use them.
Where is the public oversight panel by those who understand the business of eHealth? If you spend public money there should be mechanisms for transparent accountability for your actions, and your outcomes.
Oh what we could have done in e-Health in Australia with all the hundreds of millions wasted on NEHTA. It is a national scandal. And ehealth and the nation is poorer for it. Again.
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