NWDA’s HEALTHCOM EDI TRANSMISSIONS WILL BEGIN MAY 5

NWDA's HEALTHCOM EDI TRANSMISSIONS WILL BEGIN MAY 5, David Prins, VP-IOS development for the National Wholesale Druggists' Association Service Corp. said March 9 at NWDA's marketing conference in Dallas. "We have been actively working with [General Electric], our technology partner in testing the network for all levels of EDI [electronic data interchange] documents," Prins said, and "we hope to be sending EDI documents between trading partners by the fifth of May this year." NWDA Service Corp. is the arms-length for-profit entity created by NWDA to run the the Interorganizational System (IOS) dubbed Healthcom. After the initialization of EDI activity, NWDA Service Corp. expects an item-level database to be rolled out by June, Prins said. He said the database "has been out for review [and] we are finalizing the initial design so the constraints that we are running to are standards." He added that NWDA Service Corp. will work with the American National Standards Institute (designers of X.12 EDI standards), wholesalers and manufacturers "to design the final stage of this thing." Prins announced that the industry consulting firm D.P. Hamacher and Associates and Medi-Span "have graciously agreed to help both with the initial design of this but also have agreed to help do an initial data load." He added that "we can now jump- start an industry application thanks to two outside companies helping." Prins told meeting attendees that "the critical thing here is that each of you who have been sent contracts need to sign them and return them and work with GE to get the software advice and the activity established for the network." He asked for "an operational commitment...to get your contracts in, get your companies tested and get ready to move." To date, 170 entities have joined the user group for the network. NWDA Chairman Dwight Steffensen (Bergen Brunswig) admitted March 10 that "our overall schedule for Healthcom has not been 100% on track" and that "initial transaction testing was not smooth by any means." However, Steffensen told the meeting: "We have now overcome some of the complexities initially encountered in electronically communicating among a large number of companies with very different internal systems."