One of the greatest challenges facing the Health industry is the issue of product master data. There have been numerous attempts at developing industry catalogues and considerable effort is expended assembling and maintaining these catalogues. The advantage offered by the use of the hTrak application is the incorporation of up to date manufacturers' product master data. hTrak works with industry barcode standards organisations such as the HIBCC UPN repository and GS1 as well as the manufacturers themselves to obtain high quality product master data. Our web server based ASP (Application Service Provider) model allows us to maintain data integrity at a single point. Handhelds are updated intelligently and automatically with the latest manufacturer's data without the need for any hospital resources through our smart handheld synchronisation processes.

It is simply not practical for each department, or indeed each hospital, to maintain this product master data. To give you an idea of the degree of difficulty faced by individual hospitals in maintaining their own ERP data, on average we currently accommodate between 700 and 1300 changes per month.

By scanning the manufacturers' barcodes, this product master data is immediately brought into play in terms of automating the supply chain processes.

When hTrak is first implemented and a Department and inventory profile created, the appropriate hospital codes are added i.e. hospital product code, GL code, pricing, cost centres, etc.

When a device is scanned, all these elements are automatically captured at the same time.