We Look To Be Seeing Very Little Progress In E-Health Standards In Australia. Why Is That I Wonder?

I hoped onto the Standards Australia e-Health web site a few days ago. I was curious to see what had become of all those Tiger Team standards that were to be delivered to urgently. We started to hear about Tiger Teams in 2011 and they were apparently really rolling later that year.

See here:

Sunday, November 27, 2011

The Tiger Teams Are Off And Rolling. To Where Is Really Unclear!

On the 17^th November, 2011 there was a daylong meeting of the Tiger Team which is working to specify what is to be the Consolidated View of the PCEHR.

As it happens a kind soul has made available some of the documents that were used / came from this meeting.

First to provide some context.

It is intended that the PCEHR will be accessed via an Orion Systems Home Page for that particular patient.

There will be a space for the usual controls and for a document list at the left of the screen - some patient ID across the top of the screen and the Consolidated View (CV), which will include access to the Shared Health Summary and then a range of Event Summaries (Discharge Summaries, Test Results etc) will be at the right.

From this point on it would seem the design - which is due to be frozen come November, 30 - would still seem to be rather fluid with a large range of design decisions yet to actually be taken.

The focus of the meeting was on presentation of the clinical information in the screen real estate available - there apparently being confidence the data issues around the contents of all the information were already resolved. Time will tell if this is true.

Buckets more here:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/tiger-teams-are-off-and-rolling-to.html

(I note in passing what we have from Orion looks nothing like the mock-up that is shown in the picture associated with that blog!)

Moving on to recent standards publications which can be viewed here:

http://www.e-health.standards.org.au/Home/Publications.aspx

For 2013 we seem to have this:

ATS 90006.1-2013                             Core discharge summary – Structured document template

For 2012 we have:

HB 262 (Rev)-2012                            Guidelines for messaging between diagnostics providers and health service providers

TR 5416-2012 NEW                           Guide to HL7 V2 message parsing and management of character escaping with reference to backward compatibility

AS 21667-2012                                 Health Indicators Conceptual Framework

AS 2828.1-2012 NEW                        Health records - Part 1: Paper-based health records                 

AS 2828.2(Int)-2012 NEW                 Health records - Part 2: Digitized (scanned) health record system requirements     

MP 120-2012 NEW                           Telehealth: Remote Patient Monitoring - Discussion Paper            

MP 54-2012 NEW                             Survey of standards environment for telehealth devices

AS 4700.2-2012                                Implementation of Health Level Seven (HL7) Version 2.4 - Pathology and diagnostic imaging (diagnostics)

For 2011 we have all these:

HB 308 2011                                     Location of digital signatures in HL7 V2 Messages

AS ISO 27799-2011                           Information security management in health using ISO/IEC 27002   

ATS ISO 25237-2011                          Pseudonymization                                                                  

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Essentially we have seen zilch I can detect from the much ballyhooed Tiger Teams that would actually seem to relate directly to the NEHRS and its associated functions etc…

Conceptual frameworks and guidelines seem to feature but not much that clearly seems relevant.

Another miss I would suggest. The NEHRS is hardly documented at the Standards level that I can see.

Could it just be that NEHTA and DoHA are utterly clueless when it comes to working with people who are competent and have some ideas other than those coming from the centre?

David.