NSW Health heads down e-procurement path

The NSW Department of Health will implement a new e-procurement hub to standardise its purchasing processes.

The hub is based on Gentran Integration Suite (GIS), an SOA-based platform developed by Sterling Commerce.

Sterling Commerce won the tender as part of a consortium that also includes Fusion Management and e-Centric Innovations.

With the design stage already having commenced, testing and user acceptance is scheduled for February 2009. The system is due to go live in March 2009.

It replaces a previously manual system, Sterling Commerce said in a statement.

The new system will keep track of some 30,000 internal items and potentially millions of vendor items purchased annually across the state.

Specifically, it will supply the department with the capability to maintain internal data for each product, while enabling receipt and management of vendor data via an on-line interface to the National Product Catalogue (NPC), an online data pool managed by GS1 Australia and administered to NSW Health by the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA).

The NPC allows institutions in all States and Territories to obtain essential information about the medicines, medical devices and healthcare products they use, from one electronic source. It also holds information about non-medical products, such as office supplies and food items.

Vendors not using the NPC will be able to add their term data directly into a web entry page. This form will enable one by one entry of term and pricing data or new items, changes to existing items and deletion of items, Sterling Commerce said.

All new vendor data will be maintained in the vendor catalogue and updated automatically when additions or changes are submitted, the company said.

NSW Health users will be able to directly log-in to the catalogue, receive and manage contract data from NSW Commerce, and publish files to other systems, including the NSW Health Oracle ERP system and the Department of Commerce Smartbuy application, it added.