The association of 800 GPs and 200 practices, known as GPpartners, has rolled out electronic health records for patients with chronic illnesses in Brisbane's north and is moving to install the technology in Western Australia's Goldfields region.
The system draws on technology developed for the HealthConnect project, which dropped into obscurity when state and federal governments agreed to hand responsibility for developing a health e-record to the National E- Health Transition Authority.
GPpartners deputy chief executive Brett Silvester said the Western Australia project was in its early stages and it followed the rollout of e-record technology to 130 GPs and two hospitals in the Brisbane area. About 500 Queensland patients with chronic illnesses are enrolled in the Brisbane system, known as the Health Record eXchange (HRX), but demand for e-records is starting to outstrip GPpartners ability to sign up new patients in the region.
Mr Silvester said HRX grew out of the HealthConnect project after developers in the co-operative research centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology saw potential in the Tasmanian and Brisbane HealthConnect pilots.
The research was spun off into a company dubbed Extensia Solutions and a number of the developers of HRX are now working with NEHTA to develop national e-record standards.
"They took some software that was built for the HealthConnect trials and tried to make it work," Mr Silvester said.
"There are a lot of components from a lot of different people that we're using."
However, Mr Silvester said, a lot still needed to be done by clinicians and organisations such as NEHTA if Australia was to have a national electronic health record. Nevertheless, the potential Western Australian project, being considered by the Goldfields Esperance GP network, was a major step in the spread of e-records.
In particular, a national reach for HRX could help GPpartners get more funding, as federal agencies could not afford to back systems that only applied to individual regions.
GPpartners' Brisbane HRX project is partly funded by state and federal government grants, but the organisation is in danger of running out of money to continue the rollout come March next year.
The way to said deliver sustainable e-record projects was to grant sustainable funding over years rather than hand out large dollops of cash with short delivery timetables and no ongoing support, Mr Silvester said.
"Some people say that a national health e-record is a 30-year project. We're only in our third year," he said.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Ben Woodhead
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 21.08.2007
