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PROCUREMENT
Above: The Jubilee Wing at Leeds General Infi rmary. Right: A slide from Graham Medwell’s presentation.
giving the details to the commissioning team.” Working with GS1
In June, Medwell gave a presentation on Leeds’ progress to the GS1 UK Healthcare Conference in Loughborough.
Leeds has been working with GS1 and its predecessor body for 10 years, submitted case studies to the Department of Health’s ‘Coding for Success’ in 2006, and the team were also involved in the e-enablement strategy with the now-defunct NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency.
The introduction of Global Location Numbers (GLNs) trust-wide is a particular success, Medwell said, and it has been working with Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS FT to implement the same thing there.
NHE spoke to Slater and Medwell on the morning that a new Oracle ERP solution went live at the trust, and Medwell said: “The GLNs are used as part of the new system that’s gone live today, so we’re able to use the 13-digit GLN to identify all our requisitioning points.”
NHS should make better use of existing technologies
Talking about existing e-enablement
technologies and those on the horizon, Medwell said that if the GHX Exchange didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it. With that global method of transacting business in place, trusts and suppliers build on it with the use of catalogues, the data pool, and the global synchronisation network to pull information through into a system that already exists.
Slater said: “The technologies that the NHS needs today are out there and are available. Whether the NHS is using those technologies is another matter, at the moment. We’ve got diff erent catalogue providers, diff erent inventory solution providers; I don’t think we’re short of technology. However, from our point of view as Leeds Teaching Hospitals, we’re always looking at what’s in the wings. For instance, we keep an eye on the retail sector – we’re probably 10 or 15 years behind retail.”
Supplier compliance As NHE found when talking to other
30 | national health executive Nov/Dec 14
procurement managers around the country, one concern is ensuring suppliers take the same steps on compliance that the NHS does.
Slater said: “Suppliers will only do it when they see some benefi t for the supply chain, and there is benefi t for the supply chain. If we’re putting out clean orders, there’s a reduction in cost for the supplier, for instance. If we’re not having to return goods, there’s a saving there. If we’re getting invoice prices matched, there’s a benefi t there.
“The problem is that the standards alone aren’t going to give you those benefi ts. The standards are just an enabler to implement the systems and solutions.
“GS1 is only one of the main building blocks or foundations of e-enablement. Unfortunately, people say ‘I’ve adopted GS1 standards…away we go’: but no, once you’ve put the systems in place to use those standards, you’ve then got to educate the end-users.”
Slater said any barcode-based system, whether in retail or healthcare or any other sector, depends on the end-user scanning it correctly and every time. “At a supermarket, if the operative doesn’t put your product across the barcode reader then a) you don’t get charged for it, and b) the replenishment of the supply chain does not happen.
“That’s exactly the same here; unless you’ve got their hearts and minds, they can forget to scan in – that causes a problem.”
He noted that clinical staff always need to be won over to trust the system. “If they can’t see 10 [of the product] on the shelf – they’re not comfortable. Despite what you tell them and show them in terms of back order history, they only feel comfortable with physical stock on the shelf.
“So the data standards are only one part of it; the change management process is the big thing that we as a hospital have to do.”
Supplier relationships
Medwell said: “I’ve got relationships with supplier representatives in the supply chain, rather than just purely in the traditional area of customer relationships. We have a common thread with supply chain managers in the
Chris Slater
FOR MORE INFORMATION W:
www.leedsth.nhs.uk
Graham Medwell
private sector, and that all revolves around the data. It’s a matter, in many cases, of trying to ‘restrict the creativity’ of other people – because we’re trying to ensure there’s a fl ow of information between the two organisations.”
Medwell said that one of the suppliers at the “good end” of the spectrum in terms of data standards is Cook Medical, whose vice president and chief information offi cer Chuck Franz writes for NHE on page 31.
“The relationships we have with Cook are excellent,” Medwell said. “We’re able to link through to their catalogues, they work with us on those, and whenever we create a contract, that information is fed in. Both sides – ourselves and Cook – can see the same data through a portal. So any changes to that have to go through both sides and be agreed by both sides.
“We’ve worked with them to take dispute resolution from the end of the process, where it normally is – when an invoice comes in and doesn’t match – to the beginning of the process when you’re creating a contract. That makes an awful lot of diff erence to the data fl owing through, and that’s how you link into the standards and ensure clean data – paperless, touchless – from the start to the end.”
Cook Medical took its fi rst steps in moving from separate product portfolios to a single global product catalogue back in 2001, and has been making progress ever since, using the GS1 Standards, Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs), GLNs, and a GS1 Global Data Synchronisation Network (GDSN)-certifi ed data pool.
Slater added: “I think we at Leeds have got probably one of the slickest order-to-cash processes in the NHS with Cook, because of the systems we’ve put in place.”
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