And there are no plans in place to make the service available where it is most needed - in GPs' offices.
Doctors and medical software developers are "bitterly disappointed" that it will be years before patients see any benefits from the new HI service, built to support expanded electronic information-sharing across the health sector.
Although Medicare allocated a 16-digit unique patient identity number to every Australian in its database on July 1 to meet a deadline set by Health Minister Nicola Roxon, the number is only available by phone and cannot be used by anyone.
And the National E-Health Transition Authority plans to initially roll-out the system to public hospitals only, with a series of pilot projects underway over the next two years; however, public sector hospitals will be unable to use the identifiers to communicate with other health providers.
Medical Software Industry Association president Geoffrey Sayer said the consultation process was "dysfunctional", resulting in a "flawed" implementation plan devised by the federal-state government-owned agency.
"The real improvements in safety, quality of care and efficiencies will only come when the GPs, specialists, diagnostic services, aged care and allied health professionals are part of the system," Dr Sayer said.
"There is no plan for that despite our repeated warnings to NEHTA, and our willingness to help.
"It's like having a critical vaccine locked up in a warehouse, and not talking to the trucking companies about how to get it to doctors."
Software-makers have been hamstrung in doing the necessary work to interface medical practice systems with the HI service, as technical specifications were not released before the HI legislation was passed late last month, and this work will take some months.
Allocation of HIs to medical providers is also many months away, while the key security component, the National Authentication Service for Health, is not ready.
A NEHTA spokeswoman said it acknowledged the software industry was keen to get involved as quickly as possible, "however the implementation process was deliberately staged to provide for careful monitoring and evaluation".
"NEHTA is taking a pragmatic approach that will see a full-scale national deployment commencing within 18-24 months," she said.
"While the introduction of identifiers alone will have minimal business impact, an extensive change management program needs to be developed to ensure the identifiers are used to support e-health."
Australian Medical Association president Andrew Pesce said the AMA had long called for a proper implementation plan for healthcare identifiers.
"While we didn't expect much to happen on July 1, we do expect there should be a lot more action on informing medical practices what they need to do," he said.
"We also expect the government and NEHTA to be actively working with the medical software companies so that the software can be developed."
While patient identifiers had been created, "they can't be used in practice", and there was little point in doctors obtaining their identifiers "until there is a reason to use them", Dr Pesce said.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 26.07.2010
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