Benefits of the National Product Catalogue for Supply Chain

As a highly efficient automated process for keeping product information reliable, properly formatted, and up to date, the NPC lays the foundation for improved data quality, traceability, efficiency, and effectiveness to help drive costs out of the supply chain and enhance patient safety.

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  Ensure validated source of data
  Based on global and industry defined standards, the core of the NPC is to provide a single process sharing consistent item data for use across all trading partners and processes. The elimination of duplication of processes lies at its core with the goal to enable greater quality controls and ensure that the data used within healthcare comes directly from the supplier, not via crowd sourcing, third parties, easily manipulated spreadsheets or from people who should be focussed on providing care to patients.

  
  

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  Empowering automation
  Supportive of enhanced business processes and automation by enabling more timely and therefore most accurate data to be available for use within business processes.

  
  

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  Alignment to data management processes
  Ability to control data creation and align to internal data management processes ensures quality data to support improved processes across a wide variety of use cases. The documented use cases are available for further reference.

  
  

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  Developed to benefit whole of Australian healthcare
  As the NPC has been developed for and with the Australian healthcare sector, with stakeholders from across the sector provide a governance advisory layer, this collaborative environment ensures benefits to all users and a balanced approach to data requirements that are more easily managed by suppliers.

  
  

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  Option to leverage for UDI
  There is an option for centralised management of UDI data requirements provides additional benefits to Medical Device manufacturers supplying products into various countries

  
  

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  Secure data environment
  A single process for sharing data related to financial management processes within trading partners (e.g. Reimbursement codes) with the potential to also provide One-to-One pricing data to trading partners.

  
  

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  Linkage to external sources
  Ability to share links to trusted documentation related to products within the product data file (eg: Safety Data Sheets, Instructions for Use) to support the ongoing need to provide additional information related to your products. Providing the validated links ensures the right reference documents are used but also supports the transformation of industry to remove unnecessary printed documentation.

  
  

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  Linkage to digital content
  Links to product images or instructional videos can be shared to help buyers within health services choose your products and those who are using them to use them correctly.