Future-focused roundtable working together on new technologies and surety

HealthShare Victoria (HSV) was very pleased to host the ANZ Health Procurement Roundtable (ANZHPR) at HSV’s Melbourne office in November. This marked the first in-person event in two years and was a significant highlight on the Australasian Procurement and Construction Council Inc’s (APCC’s) annual calendar. The roundtable was all about leveraging the combined knowledge and expertise from Australia and New Zealand’s government procurement agencies, with a particular focus on delivering better value in health procurement. 

The roundtable was opened by HSV’s Chief Executive Susan Delroi and Chief Procurement Officer Sarah Bryant. Both were first-time attendees at the roundtable, being relatively new to HSV.

As a native Kiwi, Sarah kicked off proceedings by relating the parallels between Australian and Aotearoa health systems and both countries’ First Nations’ approach to medicines, while Susan delved into strategies to address procurement challenges. Susan detailed how HSV plans to increase its focus on strategic procurement and reduce the time it takes to get to market.

“We’ll be streamlining our procurement processes and systems to improve our efficiency, and we’ll work to improve benchmarking of our performance to validate the benefits we deliver to health services,” Susan says.

“At HSV we also need to maximise the potential of our Derrimut and Dandenong South distribution centres and increase volume and scale purchases to offset rising costs.”

Rowena McCarthy, APPC’s Program Manager for the ANZHPR, prepared a future-oriented agenda for the roundtable, exploring what’s coming in 2026 and beyond and collaborative approaches to value creation. Over 2 days, some 25 attendees discussed a broad range of issues including jurisdictional disruptions, regulatory updates, compliance and technological advances.

One presentation explored the risks to product surety of the EU’s new medical device regulations. While patient safety is set to improve, important challenges for health procurement professionals include fewer suppliers and manufacturers, reduced competition and higher costs.

A subsequent presentation examined industry readiness for upcoming UDI (unique device identification) regulations, another safety improvement which will greatly improve product traceability and patient care.

The group worked on ANZHPR’s 2026 Strategic Plan, where surety of supply was again a key concern. “It was vital for us to determine how we can ensure we have sufficient suppliers to support the Australian and New Zealand health sectors in crises and enable proactive responses as crises identify themselves,” Sarah notes.

Looking to the future inevitably involves considering the impacts and capabilities of AI. The session presentations and discussions covered health-specific case studies, limitations of GPT reasoning, the need for custom AI models and the importance of governance.

“The group began ideation of the potential for AI being integrated into strategic planning and driving continuous innovation, and being used for real-time insights, forecasting and automated decision-making,” reports Sarah.

Overall, the roundtable drew on the diverse expertise and shared experiences of participants and presenters to make meaningful progress in driving further value in health procurement.

“We came together with curiosity, passion and purpose,” Rowena says. “The event sparked ideas and connection, and created a space to think deeply about our shared purpose and accelerate our future goals.”

Sarah is in agreement. “There was a very strong appetite to collaborate, and everyone present was eager to find ways to support the ANZ health procurement community.”

Above image: (L to R – back): Liam Duffield, QLD; Kelly Gould, QLD; Rod Treadwell, NZ (on screen); Will Monaghan, NT; Andrew Murphy, ACT; Alfred Matthews and Manni Deol from HSV

(L to R – front) Teresa Scott, APCC; Rowena McCarthy, APCC; Sarah Bryant, HSV and Catherine Epps, NZ