Health Care eStandards Group Announces
Several Advances
Ann Arbor, Mich., December 21, 2000 - The Health Care eStandards Work Group,
founded by the leading group purchasing organizations and
e-commerce companies serving the health care market, has
announced several advances in its efforts to adopt and promote
uniform industry standards for supply chain transactions over
the Internet. The group has taken four significant steps since
its June 2000 formation:
1. A new identity: The Health Care
eStandards Work Group now has a new name, the Coalition for
Healthcare eStandards (CHeS), reflecting the Coalition's
efforts of inclusion among all segments of the industry.
2. Management structure: Association
Management Resources LLC (AMR), a professional management
services firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich., now coordinates the
Coalition's activities.
Services offered by AMR will include
administration, website management, financial management,
meeting and conference planning and membership recruitment. AMR
currently provides association management services to
organizations such as the College
of Healthcare Information Management Executives, Health Level Seven (HL7) and Microsoft Healthcare Users Group
(MS-HUG). Each member of the Coalition has contributed
financially to fund the work of the management firm and ongoing
work of the Coalition.
"The Coalition has brought together
industry leaders that account for more than two-thirds of the
health care industry's GPO buying power, to focus on a common
goal of reducing costs
throughout the supply chain through the
utilization of uniform e-commerce data standards," said
Mark McDougall, AMR's senior vice president. "AMR is
pleased to provide the headquarters and staff support for this
incredibly important initiative with tremendous industry wide
cost-savings opportunities," he added.
3. Endorsement of ECCMA standard: The
first major project the Coalition is tackling is the adoption
of a common product categorization code for all health care
products. The group investigated a number of initiatives
currently underway and has decided to endorse the efforts of
the Electronic Commerce Code Management Association (ECCMA), a
not-for-profit organization established by the United Nations
and Dun and Bradstreet in 1999. These two organizations joined
their product classification coding schemes to form the
Universal Standard Products and Services lassification (UNSPSC)
organization for the global marketplace.
"ECCMA is in the early stages of
developing codes for all healthcare product categories, so this
represents a significant window of opportunity for our industry
to support their work," commented Joe Pleasant, senior
vice president, Premier Inc. "In the very near future,
we'll be ommunicating to our business partners and colleagues
encouraging their support of ECCMA's efforts in a universal
infrastructure for identifying products throughout the supply
chain."
ECCMA plans to complete development
of its product categorization standards by the end of January
and will allow its members to provide comment on the standards
before finalizing them shortly thereafter. Once the standards
are finalized, the members of the Coalition have committed to
adopt ECCMA's product categorization standards as the standards
they use for their business processes and e-commerce platforms.
4. Focus on HINs: In addition to working
with the ECCMA, the Coalition is joining forces with the Health
Industry Business Communications Council (HIBCC) to refocus the
industry's attention on the use of the health industry
numbering system (HIN). A Coalition task force, along with
HIBCC and others, will offer recommendations next spring about
how the group members plan to incorporate health industry
numbers into the e-commerce platforms they are using. By making
HINs a core component of their e-commerce platforms, GPOs and
e-commerce companies hope to reate the momentum for the rest of
the industry to finally make HIBCC-assigned health industry
numbers the only numbers used by suppliers and distributors to
identify individual health care organizations.
"The Coalition wants to use
e-commerce as a springboard to drive industry standards, not
create new standards, but dive deeper into what exists today
and make those standards better and make them work," said
John Burks, senior vice president of Novation, the Irving,
Texas-based group purchasing organization.
About the Coalition for Healthcare
eStandards
The Coalition for Healthcare eStandards is
a group of leading healthcare purchasers, suppliers and
distributors advocating for the adoption of uniform industry
standards for supply chain transactions over the Internet.
Formed in June 2000, members of the Coalition include Consorta,
empactHealth.com, Healthtrust Purchasing Group, Insource Health
Services, MedAssets.com, MedCenterDirect.com, medibuy.com,
Neoforma, Novation, and Premier Purchasing Partners, LP. This
group represents nearly 70 percent of the health care providers
in the United States. Visit www.CHeStandards.org for more
information about the Coalition.
