09.05.14
eProcurementStrategy will drive efficiency – DH
The Department of Health has released the NHS eProcurement strategy, with an ambition that all NHS purchase-to-pay transactions and category management activities be undertaken electronically.
The strategy comes after last autumn’s ‘Better Procurement, Better Value, Better Care’ document, which established a new Procurement Development Programme to help NHS trusts ‘stabilise’ their non-pay spending. That was aimed at ensuring trust’s spending does not rise above its current level by the end of 2015-16, which should equate to £1.5bn in procurement efficiencies.
The key parts of the new strategy are to:
- Define standards to ensure NHS e-procurement systems work together
- Require the adoption of standards by the NHS (GS1 coding and PEPPOL messaging standards)
- Invest in technology solutions that will support e-procurement implementation by the NHS
- Establish a single NHS spend analysis and price benchmarking service
The DH admitted that it “will take several years of concerted effort” across the NHS landscape, and across the NHS supplier base, to achieve this ambition, but that ultimately eProcurement is about making procurement processes faster and more efficient.
To embed these standards, the DH will centrally fund and procure the critical national infrastructure to support the strategy, which will be interoperable with existing and future local eProcurement systems so that trusts can locally select their preferred technology partners.
The strategy also drives patient safety benefits. Barcodes based on the GS1 standards can be read at any point in the healthcare supply chain so that a product subject to a safety alert can be quickly located and recalled. Providers of NHS-funded healthcare, including the independent sector, must be able to electronically track and trace individual medicines and medical devices to a specific patient.
Dr Dan Poulter MP, minster for health, said: “Previous efforts to improve eProcurement in the NHS have been patchy due to a lack of central direction. We have now mandated the use of the GS1 and PEPPOL standards by amending the NHS Standard Contract to require compliance with this NHS eProcurement strategy.
He added: “Importantly, though, there is nothing in the strategy that hasn’t already been done in part somewhere, either in the NHS, in another sector or in another country. What is new, however, is bringing all these elements together in one cohesive strategy to improve patient care through a modern, effective and efficient NHS procurement function.”
A full review of the eProcurement strategy, including thoughts from Steve Graham, lead in eProcurement at the DH, will be in the May/June 2014edition of National Health Executive.
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