IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

NeHTA’s immediate future was decided at a meeting of the Standing Council on Health in Brisbane this month, although there is no commitment to a long-term role for the organisation.

No public announcement has been made and the level of funding is yet to be agreed.

Health services in NSW have been in limbo pending the outcome of the election, but the landslide victory by the Barry O’Farrell-led Coalition is likely to precipitate a frenzy of activity as the new government looks to implement its e-health policies.

Jillian Skinner will take on the role of Health Minister within the new government. During the election campaign, the NSW Coalition’s policies focussed on health issue prevention, openness, better management of chronic disease and increased community involvement in the running of the NSW public health system.

The bill, which the federal government says will bring the management of health records into the 21st century, passed with the support of the coalition despite the concerns of some MPs.

Liberal MP Andrew Laming said Australia must learn from the experiences of the US and Britain where similar electronic records systems have been implemented.

While the bill was being criticized by some Opposition senators for some privacy concerns, its benefits have overshadowed the criticisms and made it pass the Senate, says the report.

Due to be introduced on 1 July 2012, the planned e-health system will allow patients to manage their own healthcare better and Ms Roxon said the blueprint was a step towards the development of Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR).

“E-health records will drive safer, more efficient and better quality healthcare for Australians,” Ms Roxon said.

The Federal Government’s finalised Concept of Operations on its $466.7 million Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) project still needs “fine tuning”, according to the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP).

The document (PDF), released earlier this week, finalised details put forward in the draft report issued in April this year.

The Federal Government decided to reach out a helping hand to Tasmania, because the state's system wasn't coping with its older population and higher rates of chronic disease. Funding has been found for areas of need, including additional surgery facilities, chronic disease management and training, as well as e-health.

In the 2012-13 Budget, the government had to find money to continue its personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) scheme, which will see the roll-outs of electronic records to all Australians who opt in from 1 July. The funds that it had already provided were to run out in June.

Health chief information officer Paul Madden said clinical data would be encrypted during transmission between medical providers or patients and the national infrastructure, "so that it cannot be interfered with or intercepted".

"But at the point of viewing, the security risks start to turn into the level of protection on the PC," he told a Cybersafety for Seniors inquiry last week in Sydney, where he also touched on the future of the National E-Health Transition Authority.

The Hunter Valley is one of three regions in Australia to pilot the program that links a patient's medical records between doctors, hospitals and other providers.

Trials are also running in Brisbane and Melbourne.

Nine small health IT projects have received $70 million in funding, as Health Minister Nicola Roxon picks up the pace on the e-health record program.

The projects, announced in March, had to undergo a second round of bidding before receiving funds under the PCEHR (personally controlled electronic record program) "second-wave" initiative. Originally, up to $55m was allocated for the program.

The final plans (PDF) for the health record system, which is expected to be made available to the general public in July next year, were released by the Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, today.

Lexi Metherell has taken a look at a pioneering online service which began in Australia.

The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) halted the rollout of primary care desktop software at 10 trial sites on Friday blaming incompatibility with the national specifications.

It is the latest blow for the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) project, which has attracted $466 million in federal funding over two years and is considered vital to efforts to combat preventible and chronic disease.

The legislation currently before parliament that will enable the PCEHRs has a requirement "not to hold or take records outside Australia". This is designed to prevent Australian customer data to be held outside of the country where there is less control over privacy of the data held, but, as CSC Healthcare Australia New Zealand national director Lisa Pettigrew noted, it could effectively ban patients who are overseas from accessing their own data because data from the records may be cached outside of Australia.

The Gillard government's PCEHR system is supposed to be operational from July 1.

But the National E-Health Transition Authority has revealed "activity in the e-health sites to date has focused on recruitment of (GP) practices and connection to the (Medicare-operated) Healthcare Identifiers service".

The Privacy Foundation has accused the Australian Senate of ignoring privacy concerns in making the e-health record system opt-out.

The Australian Privacy Foundation has accused the Senate of being "dangerously naive" in thinking that opt-out e-health records could be secured against breaches of privacy.

Bernard Robertson-Dunn, a member of the Privacy Foundation who has also constructed IT systems for several government departments, said it is "patently absurd" for the Senate inquiry committee to think that Australian laws will do anything to deter criminals and cyber attacks from overseas

"To date, all testing of the PCEHR system has been undertaken using test data, which comprises fictitious demographic and healthcare identifier details," an explanatory statement says.

"This proclamation enables real data testing of the system before it goes live on July 1."

By the end of June, 397,745 patients had registered for a PCEHR, and that number was only reached after a huge surge in sign-ups during the month, according to figures obtained by The Australian.

Dr Clarke said the program was a guise to mask the creation of an ID regime in the health sector, following past failed attempts to introduce national identity cards.

"If the personally controlled e-health record falls over and the smokescreen disappears, the bureaucrats won't care," Dr Clarke told The Australian.