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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39229704,00.htm

Durham health consortium outsources e-procurement
Inefficiencies chopped

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Thursday 22 May 2008

A consortium of health trusts and HM Prisons within County Durham has outsourced its shared procurement hub, which it uses to source around £350m of supplies and equipment a year.

The service will be hosted by the e-procurement specialist supplier Wax Digital. The consortium's incumbent e-procurement system was maintained in-house.

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The system will pave the way to completely electronic procurement, cutting out inefficiencies associated with paper processes.

County Durham Procurement Consortium associate director of procurement Malcolm Preston told silicon.com: "It's a fully managed service so the risk goes to the supplier. There is one log on process to a fully integrated application set. As a result of the efficiencies gained, there will be a reduction in staff."

The system will be able to provide a high level of detail in the way the trusts use supplies and it will be possible to track a patient's journey through the healthcare system through the supplies used to treat them. This will provide a highly detailed picture about the way the trusts spend their budgets.

Clinical staff are already involved in the procurement process, but Preston foresees this involvement increasing through the streamlining of the procurement process the system could provide.