IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Labor has pledged to connect 11 million homes in eight years to high-speed broadband under the NBN program, at a cost of $43 billion (or about $2500 each).

The NBN will be based on optical fibre - glass or plastic strand carrying light from lasers. Current connections run on copper networks.

Implementation partners, including IT companies, will be able to participate in the process in a few key areas, National E-health Transition Authority chief Peter Fleming said.

"We will be looking for implementation partners in the private sector that will work with us as we go through the journey of implementing the unique healthcare identifier program, then the packages such as discharge referral and then the electronic health record," Mr Fleming said.

Gil Carter, general manager of authentication at NEHTA, told attendees at the CeBIT's e-government Forum today that critics should consider the "wicked problems trying to be solved" when reading any adverse press about its efforts.

The submissions will help test initial specifications for the personally-controlled electronic health record (PCEHR), and successful applicants will form a panel of clinical desktop vendors responsible for working with the NEHTA.

The initiative is part of a $466 million investment by the federal government aimed at enabling Australians to register for individual summaries by June 2012.

The National e-Health Transition Authority (NeHTA) is claiming a milestone in the advancement of a national e-health system with the first live implementation of the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT).

The AMT is a NeHTA-developed set of specifications that standardise the identification, naming, and describing of medicine information.

The standard is needed so that branded and generically equivalent medicines and their components, and standard naming conventions and terminology, are accurately described.

This afternoon the National E-Health Transition Authority — which, with the Federal Department of Health, is coordinating the project — went to market for what it called a “National Authentication Service for Health (NASH).

However, the National E-Health Transition Authority is vague about the adoption of individual e-health records, with its plan saying only that it will work on the development and the business case leading before 2012.

Pressure has been growing within the e-health community as a growing pile of reports warn of the cost of inaction, following the Council of Australian Government’s acceptance of a National E-Health Strategy last December.

The strategy put the cost of establishing a nationwide electronic health record system at around $1.6 billion over four years.

Acting chief executive Andrew Howard said NEHTA would adopt a different focus over the next 12 months.

"When I joined in April, my impression was of an organisation that had spent 2.5 years not delivering anything, that had no runs on the board and I was concerned it was a theoretical organisation with no understanding of the health industry," Mr Howard told the Health-e-Nation conference in Melbourne this week.

NEHTA's charge has been to bring Australia into the e-health era where every Australian has an electronic medical record. It has been working with Medicare on a number for each citizen which can be used to collate medical information.

NEHTA ended the financial year with a deficit of $2.2m, compared with a $2m surplus on taxpayer funding worth $39m in 2007-08, according to its annual report.

The NeHTA plan positions the organisation as a long term implementation authority, extending the role it has so far played in standards setting. NeHTA was established by Federal, state and territory health departments and is chaired by businessman David Gonski.

The model community would be based at the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in South Melbourne, where it would provide practitioners and software vendors with the opportunity to test the soon-to-be-introduced voluntary national healthcare identifier system, according to NEHTA clinical lead Dr Nathan Pinskier.

The strategy was formed considering the National E-Health Strategy written by Deloitte last year and the recent National Health and Hospital Reform Commission recommendations. NEHTA admitted that there had been a gap between what stakeholders expected of it and where the authority was heading. "As the organisation evolves it is important to ensure a foundation exists for 'what' the organisation has been put in place to deliver," it said.

The department secretary, Jane Halton, was being questioned by Liberal Senator Sue Boyce in supplementary budget estimates last week on how many users were taking up NEHTA products such as the electronic discharge summary and its collection of clinical terminology.

The company set up by the Australian, State and Territory governments in 2005 to lead the transition to greater use of e-health in Australia, the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), has released its Strategic Plan to 2012.

In a statement, NEHTA chief executive, Peter Fleming said the plan outlines how the agency intends to drive e-health development and includes the migration to an Individual Electronic Health Record (IEHR) service.

And there are no plans in place to make the service available where it is most needed - in GPs' offices.

Doctors and medical software developers are "bitterly disappointed" that it will be years before patients see any benefits from the new HI service, built to support expanded electronic information-sharing across the health sector.

Information Management Office acting chief executive John Grant will tell the CeBIT e-government forum in Sydney today that while it is relatively easy to move government services online, the end-user experience depends on organisational change.

The ACT government has confirmed that it is considering a trial, being pushed by NEC, to make Canberra a "ubiquitous city".

The public service, schools, businesses, hospitals, houses, cars and shops could all be connected by a range of networks and devices under the scheme, which is still in early planning stages.

The first is that the real challenge to make e-government successful is not technical, but cultural and organisational. Not surprisingly, we’ve worked out that realising the promise of new communication and collaboration technologies in government is much more about the people than it is about the machines and networks. Technology, it seems, we can pretty much do, give or take the occasional glitch. People and change, on the other hand, we find a lot harder.