IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The 18-month Telehealth Lifestyle Coordination (TLC) project will monitor and manage older people with chronic disease, who live in their own homes.

Supported by Ipswich Community Aid and Tunstall Healthcare, the pilot aims to demonstrate that telehealth solutions offer a viable alternative to hospital care.

The $352 million initiative will give people living in rural, remote and outer metropolitan locations the ability to access medical specialist consultations online.

Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, said the new service – to start on 1 July next year – would provide about 495,000 services over four years, as well as training and incentives for specialists, GPs and other health professionals.

The centre, which uses video to link specialists to patients thousands of kilometres away, is one of a handful in the country that have the facilities, and its services are only possible because the doctors at the centre and with the patient are paid a salary by Queensland Health, which also funds the technology involved.

The centre's deputy director, Anthony Smith, predicts the number of online consultations will jump if Labor wins the election and releases its promised funding for online consultations from July 1 next year.

Various systems -- collectively known as "telemedicine", in which patients consult doctors remotely using systems such as real-time video links -- are already available for such long-distance consultations.

The proposal by a professor from the University of Notre Dame had initially been designed for Goodooga residents so they could see a doctor in Sydney without leaving town.

The Murdi Paaki Regional Enterprise Corporation has been discussing the project with the Federal Government and says the Commonwealth has indicated its support for developing the initiative.

In a speech delivered to a conference in Sydney this week, Telstra's business division head Deena Shiff has called for a review of the basis on which doctors are paid and for the removal of existing barriers blocking the uptake of new technologies such as videoconferencing. Along with related facilities, such as the ability to transmit X-ray or other scan images over fast data connections, these allow patients in rural areas -- or their general practitioners -- to consult medical specialists hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away.

The Australian Government has released a tender for consulting work prior to the roll-out of a personally-controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) system.

Issued as part of the Government's $466.7 million eHealth investment, the Request for Tender for the PCEHR system (RFT 217/1011) was welcomed by the Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon.

"The successful tenderer will put in place the analytical and evaluation framework that will underpin the development of e-health records," Roxon said.

"I've actually been pleasantly surprised at a lot of the work that's been done in the background around foundation standards. We're actually starting from a very good position," Fleming told ZDNet.com.au. in an interview last week.

In a statement released yesterday, Health Minister Nicola Roxon outlined the government's "roadmap to reform" in health over the next two years, including the government's plans for an e-health portal. Roxon had previously indicated that she expected the delivery of the online portal that would allow patients access to their e-health records to take around two years, but in her statement yesterday she set a more exact deadline of July 2012.

Released on Wednesday, the report is the latest in a series on e-government. The RTA's registration services were chosen as a case study to highlight important aspects of online service delivery, says the report.

Operational staff across Transport NSW agencies will be moved to a new IT services division during December and January as part of accelerated plans to implement shared services ahead of the state election next year.

The move will be part of a temporary secondment from staff members’ respective home agencies for a nine to 12 month period, during which time the government agency is expected to formulate a more permanent structure for shared services.

Announced last night, the funding will be delivered over two years to establish an opt-in, nationally consistent patient health record system by 2012-2013.

But according to IT consultancy Ovum, $466.7m is either too little or too much to be effective, and the industry is "confused" about what the system will achieve.

Initially, only Medicare would operate a secure website or portal that would allow patients to retrieve their personally controlled electronic health records, she said.

But she left the door open for other service providers, such as health insurance providers, to manage patients' e-health records in future.

NEHTA chief executive Peter Fleming has been given a mandate to create a uniform IT infrastructure, starting with an incremental build-out of existing clinical and communication platforms.

Compiled by a consortium of Dandolopartners, Roy Morgan Research and BDO Consulting on behalf of the Australian Government Information Management Office, the survey of nearly 6000 Australians found usage of e-government services has jumped from 21 percent in 2002 to 39 percent in 2004.

The tender for the first stage of the development, the directory infrastructure - dubbed Project Rosetta - will be advertised tomorrow.

A request for tender (RFT) has been issued by the Department of Infrastructure's MultiMedia Victoria for the project dubbed "Rosetta", which has already seen "a lot" of interest from vendors.

In line with its e-business infrastructure initiative and e-health system overhaul, the Victoria Department of Human Services (DHS) will implement a new data interchange platform to facilitate information sharing between non-government organizations.

The department's business vision for the project is to provide a centralized, reliable, and secure data transfer facility that will enable non-government entities to deliver and receive data with ease and in a timely manner, according to tender documents released this week.