The department is seeking a statewide central storage and retrieval facility to support its picture archiving and communications systems and its radiology information management systems.
The tender is due to close next week.
The package also requires a patient registry to index and resolve identifiers from various feeder systems, an enterprise service bus to handle interoperability problems, and the capacity to integrate messaging with patient administration systems.
A spokesman said the department had identified the PACS-RIS project as a means of reconciling patient data ahead of the planned introduction of the national Healthcare Identifiers (HI) program.
"The enterprise solution will implement infrastructure that interfaces the state's managed identity systems, and can be used to support other state and national initiatives, including providing access to the HI service," he said.
Integration of the HI service depended on the infrastructure being deployed as part of the archive project.
"Specific details cannot be disclosed as it is part of an ongoing tender process."
The project is expected to begin before July.
The spokesman said NSW Health provided services to about 7 million people as well as a large volume of patients from across state borders and overseas visitors, resulting in "the accrual of a significant number of records within our managed patient identity systems".
National E-Health Transition Authority chief executive Peter Fleming said cleaning up patient data and resolving duplicate identifiers across diverse legacy systems was a key priority for all state governments as planning for the national Unique Healthcare Identifier service proceeded.
The start of the UHI program in July depends on the successful passage of enabling legislation through federal parliament, but Medicare Australia has completed the technical work needed to operate the service.
"Nehta now has (identifier) projects with every state and territory, but each one is slightly different because they are all in a different place with their legacy systems, environments and strategies," Mr Fleming said.
"Tasmania already has one (statewide) identifier today, so the work required to link Tasmania to the national system is fairly minimal.
"As our largest state, NSW is at the other end of the spectrum, with more than 20 identifiers.
"We're using their PACS-RIS as the starting point to build a database that reads in all of those identifiers and links them to the one main identifier."
It's understood about 80 per cent of the state's major health facilities are using an integrated PACS-RIS system.
Mr Fleming said it was a big job to clean and de-duplicate patient data across state-based systems, but a single identifier would ultimately result in safer healthcare.
The NSW Health spokesman said approaches to integration of the national HI service may vary, but they broadly ranged from organic growth to batch loading of patient data.
"The effort required in relation to reconciliation, and thus the time to market, will vary depending on the approach," he said.
"We are working with Nehta to establish a reusable reconciliation service for patient data.
"We expect the current process will yield a framework and service that can be reused across other states."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 09.02.2010
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