EDI V6020 Pilots Successfully Completed

The first two Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) pilots – conducted with St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and PROcure, a shared services organization (SSO) in southwestern Ontario – have been successfully completed.

The pilot projects aligned with Phase 2 of the Canadian Healthcare Supply Chain Standards Project, which required a single site hospital and a multi-site hospital group to test and introduce GS1 global supply chain standards into their business environment.

As such, each pilot was required to:

• Implement and test EDI version 6020 (V6020), the latest EDI transaction sets available for use by the healthcare community
• Test a minimum of 4 EDI transactions with the new EDI standard
• Introduce Global Location Numbers (GLNs) and Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) into the transactions for location and product identification, respectively.
  

Single Hospital Site Pilot Results

The St. Michael’s Hospital pilot commenced in Fall 2010. With the assistance of Rogue Data Corporation, St. Michael’s e-commerce service provider, St. Michael’s tested 4 EDI transactions using V6020:

• Purchase Order (850);
• Purchase Order Acknowledgement (855);
• Functional Acknowledgement (997); and
• Invoice (810).
  

The hospital effectively transmitted GLN and GTIN information to several trading partners through the TELUS network gateway. Due to the success of the pilot, St. Michael’s has implemented EDI V6020 documents into its production environment.

Multi-Site Hospital Group Pilot Results

The PROcure pilot began in Summer 2011. PROcure’s software firm, Ormed Information Systems, designed and implemented the V6020 functionality into PROcure’s software and its ORMED X network gateway. This allowed the data flow to originate at PROcure and be transmitted through ORMED X to TELUS and to two distributors, Cardinal Health and Medical Mart, who participated in the first EDI pilot  which was completed in early 2011.

Two additional transactions, Advance Shipping Notice (856) and Price & Sales Catalogue (832) were successfully delivered from Medical Mart back to ORMED X. PROcure plans to expand its e-commerce environment in the coming months.

Additional Pilot

Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) has completed testing of V6020 transactions in its new SAP environment. WRHA recently registered all of its Bill To and Ship To addresses in ECCnet Locations, the TrueSource® Registry for party and location information by GS1 Canada. It has been sending GLNs within the new EDI production environment since the end of November.

Key Takeaway

The pilots have demonstrated that healthcare providers and their supporting solution providers can successfully utilize standards-based EDI transaction sets that incorporate global identification standards (both GLNs and GTINs) – a key step in achieving system-wide interoperability and visibility between providers and suppliers.

All healthcare stakeholders (providers, suppliers, solution providers, etc.) should be actively involved in planning for the implementation of the latest supply chain standards: EDI V6020, GLNs and GTINs.

For more information, contact Nicole Golestani, Manager, Healthcare Implementation, GS1 Canada at nicole.golestani@gs1ca.org.