This was due to the lack of unique healthcare identifiers needed to support e-health records, and delays in establishing a secure messaging standard, according to Health's latest annual report.
"In March, Australia's health ministers announced that public consultations would be undertaken on legislative proposals for establishing healthcare identifiers and privacy protections," the report said. "The department will co-ordinate these consultations during 2009-10."
A new secure messaging component for GP eligibility for e-health practice incentive payments will in future "lead to increased adoption, particularly as improvements are made to interoperability between messaging providers", it said.
"These improvements will follow the establishment of a secure messaging standard, currently being developed by the National E-Health Transition Authority and industry and expected to be finalised in the second half of 2009."
The report notes that medical specialists and allied healthcare providers "represent future challenges in pursuing increased adoption and use of secure messaging".
The department spent $52.7 million on e-health implementation out of $55.4m budgeted in 2008-09, compared with $42.5m out of $53.8m allocated the previous year.
Pickings were slim for IT consultancies, with Accenture earning $75,000 to provide material on the business case for individual electronic health records to the Australian Government Information Management Office, and Ascent paid $60,000 to review the business case.
Meanwhile, C3 Business Solutions was paid $74,000 to develop an information management strategy for the department.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 04.11.2009
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