Update:National Product Catalogue Data Quality Improvement Program for the Australian healthcare sector

GS1 Australia and the Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency),in partnership with the Healthcare Industry, are continuing to implement theNational Product Catalogue Data Quality Improvement Program to address healthcare industry concerns relating to data quality within the National Product Catalogue (NPC).

The concerns raised by health services have included that data is not being provided or maintained to the level or quality it should to support the uses of the data. As the health services move increasingly to using the same single source of product data across all downstream systems, any perceived or actual lack of data quality impedes the progress to deliver greater digitisation of processes and the safety and efficiency benefits this can deliver. Previous updates and further details on the program are available from the Agency Supply Chain page.

Milestones achieved

We are pleased to share with you an update on our key milestones:

  • Broad industry consultation and analysis has been completed to document and measure any specific issues related to NPC data quality.
  • Data quality reporting has been developed and successfully piloted within a cross section of industry. The feedback and analysis from the pilot has influenced the final development of the reports.
  • Use cases for product data across all systems and processes within healthcare have been documented via a consultation process.The document generated from this process is now available and use cases will be incorporated in future Healthcare dataset.
  • Revised supplier synchronisation statuses and data quality indicators have been developed to help suppliers and their trading partners to assess and address their progress within their business and track their progress against industry benchmarks.
  • The process to review the NPC Healthcare dataset has commenced. This regular review is intended to ensure that the data fields captured are relevant to industry requirements, specific product data needs and theinclusion ofuse cases for data to reinforce the need for data and the importance of its quality.

The next steps

  • The final data quality reports are currently under development and scheduled to be available to the healthcare industry (for each supplier/publisher and all buyer/data recipient) by July 2017.
  • New documentation to support the end-to-end data management cycle and quality of data managed in that cycle is in developmentand scheduled for completion by July 2017.

Full deployment of the National Product Catalogue Data Quality Improvement Program is ongoing throughout 2017.

For further information

To find out more about the National Product Catalogue Data Quality Improvement Program, email or call GS1 Australia on (03) 9550 3467 or (03) 9550 3405 to speak to one of our experts.

To find out more about the Australian Digital Health Agency’s Digital Supply Chain Program, please call 1300 901 001 or email .

The National Product Catalogue (NPC) Healthcare Data Quality Improvement Program is carried out with financial assistance from the Australian Digital Health Agency.The Australian Digital Health Agency makes no representation or warranty that the information in this publication is correct or accurate.