E-procurement/GS1 standards
High profile backing for GS1 drive
At the 2016 GS1 UK Healthcare Conference in London, delegates heard from speakers including Pat Mills, the Department of Health’s commercial director, on the ongoing work to embed GS1 standards throughout the NHS in England in line with the DH’s eProcurement Strategy, published in April 2014. This mandated that any service or product procured by an English NHS acute Trust comply with the standards – one of the most obvious representations of which is on barcodes – ‘to enable Trusts to manage their non-pay spending by adopting master procurement data, automating the exchange of such data, and benchmarking their procurement against other Trusts and healthcare providers’. One of six ‘demonstrator site’ Trusts to provide a speaker at the 2016 GS1 UK national conference to report on their progress to date was Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Shortly after, HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, spoke to the Trust’s associate director, Commercial and Procurement, Chris Slater, and to head of Healthcare at GS1 UK, Glen Hodgson.
I
n unveiling the DH’s eProcurement Strategy in April 2014, the then Under- Secretary of State for Health, Dr Dan
Poulter, explained that it would establish the GS1 coding and PEPPOL (Pan European Public Procurement On-Line) standards throughout the healthcare sector and its supply chains, introducing a requirement that any service or product procured by an NHS acute Trust in England comply. The initial deadline set for compliance at a service and product level is 2019/2020. GS1 is ‘a global non-profit-making organisation which sets standards that have provided a common foundation for business since the first barcode was scanned over 40 years ago’. Having introduced the GS1 barcode in 1974, the organisation’s aim continues to be ‘to bring efficiency and transparency to the supply chain using standards already used by a reported one million plus companies’ – in areas ranging from retailing to foodservice. In the UK, GS1 standards are managed by GS1 UK, one of 112 independent, not-for-profit GS1 organisations worldwide – which is helping the DH drive implementation of GS1 identifiers and barcodes across the NHS, its supply chain, and ‘solution- providers’, at a ‘product, place, and person’ level.
Multiple applications In healthcare, the DH and GS1 UK say GS1 standards’ scope to improve efficiencies, speed workflow and patient throughput, enable equipment to be located faster, and reduce procurement costs, is ‘virtually unlimited’. The
24 Health Estate Journal September 2016
underpin the three primary ‘use cases’: purchase to-to-pay, inventory management, and patient safety recall.
Driving uptake
Glen Hodgson, head of Healthcare at GS1 UK.
standards, and GS1 barcodes carrying a unique identifier, can be applied to many areas or ‘use cases’ – from patient identification to procurement. However, recognising that while some Trusts have used GS1 standards for some years, others may be less familiar, and to ‘help Trusts understand where to start’, the DH issued guidance as part of the eProcurement Strategy on three ‘core enablers’ and three ‘primary use cases’. The Strategy mandated that each Trust adopt GS1 standards in all these areas, plus one additional ‘use case’. The three core enablers were: ‘Catalogue management’, ‘Patient identification’, and ‘Location numbering’. The DH said the three ‘enablers’ would allow any Trust to use GS1 standards to ‘identify every person, product, and every place’, and
GS1 UK has been working closely with the DH to drive uptake of GS1 standards across the NHS acute sector. This January, the Department announced that six NHS Trusts had been chosen as ‘demonstrator sites of excellence’ to receive support and a share of £12 m in funding to enable them to demonstrate what the DH believes will be the ‘significant efficiencies and cost savings, reduced errors, and improved patient outcomes and patient safety’ achievable. The six are: Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust.
Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust. Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust. Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.
Outlining the benefits At the GSI UK Healthcare Conference, representatives from all six ‘demonstrators’ explained what they foresaw as the potential benefits of widespread implementation, described their progress, and set out their plans to harness the standards to improve operational efficiency, patient safety, and patient experience, while reducing costs. – all against a backdrop where Lord Carter’s interim review had suggested that
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