The long-awaited announcement came at the Health-e-nation conference in Sydney last week, when NEHTA chief executive Ian Reinecke conceded HL7 was the only viable path.
"I know some software vendors have been waiting very keenly for a strategic direction on standards, and we will publish a detailed paper next month to articulate our position," Reinecke says.
"In the short term, NEHTA will endorse the continued support of HL7 version 2.0, which is in use in a number of areas, including pathology and patient administration.
"It wouldn't make any sense to suggest that should be changed.
"In the medium to long-term, NEHTA will endorse a service and document oriented approach based on the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and HL7 services specifications for shared e-health records."
Reinecke says this is the direction being taken by the big players in Canada, the US and Britain.
"Frankly, it wouldn't make sense for a small country to go off on any brave adventure by itself," he says.
HL7 Australia chair Klaus Veil welcomed the announcement.
"It's good news for the local e-health community and an acknowledgment of the value and maturity of HL7 standards in a global context," Veil says.
"We will work with NEHTA to support the industry migration towards HL7."
Tom Bowden, chief executive at clinical messaging specialist HealthLink, says it is a pity it had taken so long to settle on HL7 2.0, "because really there is nothing else available at the moment to do the job".
Many local developers had put their HL7 projects on hold when the newly established NEHTA announced a review of messaging standards nearly three years ago.
"There are actually a lot of good people working on HL7 here, and they possibly may have felt a little discouraged over the past two years," Bowden says.
"The lack of direction has led to shortcuts being taken, and this means there are some serious quality issues that will have to be addressed."
Clinical messaging has to be very precise and requires a lot of detailed work on software interfaces, which in turn means getting rival IT providers to work closely together.
"Overseas experience has shown that if you can get basic HL7 clinical messaging working properly in the major areas of referrals, discharge summaries and observational reports, you've got something to build on," Bowden says.
"If you don't do it well - as is the current situation in Australia - you're trying to build a house on sand."
Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 27.03.2007
