Healthlogistics.co.uk Ltd, one of the leading providers of e-procurement solutions to the NHS, has acquired hTrak Pty Ltd, Australia’s leading supplier of procedure costing and billing solutions. The companies' combined product offering will provide NHS Trusts with a unique end-to-end solution for their e-procurement requirements, resulting in significant efficiency savings.
Through this acquisition, Healthlogistics will be able to provide NHS Trusts with accurate procedure costing information for each patient, supported by bar code scanning, contract pricing of consumables, auto-replenishment of stock and full track-and-trace, all via the web.
Healthlogistics' and hTrak's combined solution has already been in use at Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust since April 2014. Using a handheld scanner, healthcare professionals capture at the point of use every item used during a procedure, record members of staff present and link the information to a specific patient. This enables healthcare providers to access live, accurate information about the cost of each procedure, and eliminates the need for manual paperwork and costing of each item after the event.
Peter Elwin, Joint Managing Director, Healthlogistics said: "Sectors such as manufacturing and retailing have widely implemented point-of-use data capture and e-procurement solutions. We believe that our combined expertise will have a transformational impact, as it will enable NHS Trusts to control their procurement spend more effectively and reduce both paperwork and inventory whilst improving patient safety."
Kirk Kikirekov, Managing Director, hTrak said: "Our customers report reductions of around 70-80% in the time taken to process replenishment requisitions, whilst automating reordering functions can save 80% on administration costs, reduce spend by 7% and inventory by 25-50%. Together with Healthlogistics we can create a more effective business operation delivering significant benefits for healthcare providers in the UK and Australasia."
The acquisition, which took place on 17th April 2015, means that customers in each country will now deal with one organisation for all of Healthlogistics' and hTrak's services. It will also enable the new organisation to leverage its combined master data for products and consumables and develop further solutions as one entity.
About Healthlogistics.co.uk Ltd
An independent company founded in 2003, Healthlogistics enables NHS Trusts to replace paper and PDF-based procurement by end-to-end electronic processes. The company currently supports 55 acute trusts in England with its eProcurement services.
Healthlogistics' cloud-based services include:
- The provision of catalogue and contract price data
- Ordering and invoicing that complies with the European PEPPOL* messaging standard
- Procurement and financial data analysis, so Trusts can optimise their non-pay spend
- Aggregation of historic and forecast demand to enable groups of Trusts to leverage their purchasing expenditure by buying together.
As specialists in product data, Healthlogistics embraces the need for common supply chain standards and procurement automation. The main issues preventing effective eCommerce in the NHS to-date have been inconsistent data and technical format incompatibility.
Healthlogistics addresses these issues and provides accurately priced product item data via its catalogue management service, and delivers electronic orders and invoices through an effective PEPPOL compliant transaction service.
Collectively Healthlogistics' and hTrak's services use a hand-held device to capture all the barcoded product items used in patient operations and link this data with their catalogue, pricing and bar code databases. This enables procedure costs to be based on actual contract prices that are specific to each Trust, and for this to be followed by automatic replenishment as in any retail environment.
About hTrak Pty Ltd
Established in Australia in 2002, hTrak provides a web-based, point of use data capture solution for healthcare.
Using the latest handheld mobile scanning technology, hTrak reads industry-standard barcodes to accurately identify products consumed. When combined with accurate pricing inputs, hTrak enables accurate identification of all the elements of a procedure and their associated costs such as staffing and overheads, and includes automatic replenishment of supplies.
With a substantial and rapidly-growing customer base in Australia, hTrak has been working in the UK healthcare market for over three years. This experience, combined with that of Healthlogistics, will uniquely enable Healthlogistics to provide a secure, web-based, integrated procedure costing and auto-replenishment solution, fed by accurate pricing data and supported by the data pools of each organisation.
* PEPPOL is the NHS's preferred messaging standard. Healthlogistics is a member of the OpenPEPPOL Association.