A few hours ago, iTnews in Australia, which provides breaking IT news for Australian businesses, published a news item that begins with this:

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

What does this mean? For starters, NSW is New South Wales and it is the most populous state in Australia. By the looks of it on the map, this news is akin to all New England states or all of the American southwest deciding to mandate a new e-procurement hub for their region.

Second, NSW Health is a government body that monitors the public health system throughout New South Wales.  I get the impression what they say goes without much debate.

What are they implementing? A new automated system, scheduled to go live in little more than three (3) months . . .  as in ninety days . . . that will keep track of some 30,000 internal items and potentially millions of vendor items purchased annually across the state.

How?

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.

If today you market medical devices to and within Australia’s most populous state, what happens, say on April 1, if your solutions do not have GS1 compliant labels? It brings a whole new meaning to our saying about if you can’t label, you can’t ship and if you can’t ship, you’re not in business.

Here is the news source in its entirety.