Benefits of implementing GS1 EDI standards at Ramsay Hospital network
In the previous post, we discussed the basis of implementing GS1 EDI standards at Ramsay Hospital. As a result, Ramsay is seeing a wide range of benefits from their EDI deployment, as is every supplier with whom they have worked to implement EDI.
Ramsay has achieved their goal of efficiency savings. Due to use of the NPC as the source of product master data and the foundation for EDI, improvements have been seen in the accuracy of product information and prices.
Vastly fewer purchase orders are blocked or rejected, and Ramsay teams are overall much more certain that they are receiving what they ordered and invoices are reliably paid as per trading terms. Hospitals have greater visibility of lead times, and Ramsay can more easily pinpoint issues where delivery times will not meet expectations.
Ramsay has also seen another important benefit from their efforts: their staff are now able to spend significantly less time on low- to no-value tasks like manually entering data, chasing payments or reworking mistakes – and as a result, are spending much more time serving the needs of patients, clinical staff and hospital executive or resolving accounts with true issues.
The cost to implement the standards and configure the EDI system was less than $100K and ongoing costs for use of an EDI service provider and GS1 memberships are approximately $25Kpa. This means that based on an approximate manual procure to pay cost of $35 AUD, the cost from automated processing of purchase orders and invoices is reduced to approximately $2 AUD. Document volumes via EDI are expected to exceed a quarter of a million documents in 2016, so the savings are significant.
To learn more about EDI user cases and become a CEDIAP® (Certified EDI Academy Professional), please visit our course schedule page.