Shaping Healthcare Procurement Standards

• Chris Heavey, Senior Market Manager

Chris Heavey, Senior Market Manager at GHX, shares an update on how GHX aims to work with the OpenPeppol community to support the implementation of Peppol across the healthcare industry.

OpenPeppol is the non-profit organisation that manages the Peppol interoperability framework. The organisation is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Peppol specifications, promoting best practices and implementation across Europe.

As a leading healthcare procurement specialist, GHX actively supports the work being done by OpenPeppol. GHX has long advocated the need for consistent standards to support an efficient and accurate flow of electronic transactions between healthcare suppliers and providers. We believe this is vital to improving reliability of service and patient safety within the healthcare industry.

Through our membership of OpenPeppol, we have an opportunity to help shape the specifications and standards for healthcare procurement across Europe, working closely with our OpenPeppol colleagues from a range of global industries.

Over the coming year, GHX will be actively contributing to this discussion as part of a community made up of fellow OpenPeppol members. Our aim is to share our knowledge and experience of the healthcare industry, to increase engagement around key topics such as:

• Reliability and security;
• Patient data privacy;
• Code of conduct; and
• Freedom of trading parties to engage with multiple service providers.

Through this active engagement and collaboration, and with the added value of shared insights and learning from other industries, we will help to co-design interoperability and technical models, and define and establish processes and specifications tailored to healthcare. GHX will also take part in other OpenPeppol activities, including networking events, forums, user communities and member meetings, to promote further engagement with the healthcare industry’s goals and objectives for Peppol.

Alongside this, as a Peppol-certified Service Provider, we are working with our multi-national supplier customers and trading partners across Europe to connect them to the Peppol eDelivery Network.

What is Peppol?

Peppol is a set of specifications that enable trading partners to exchange electronic supply chain documents, such as e-invoices, purchase orders and purchase order acknowledgments, across a network of businesses that all meet the same eProcurement standards.

Visit the OpenPeppol website for more information and a full list of OpenPeppol members.

Chris Heavey

Senior Market Manager