Health Minister Nicola Roxon has confirmed GP Partners in Brisbane, GP Access in the NSW Hunter Valley and Melbourne East will receive $12.5 million in total funding to act as pilot sites over the next two years.
The Australian today revealed the three GP divisions had been selected as lead implementation sites, under a project led by the National E-Health Transition Authority.
Ms Roxon said the three lead sites "will be at the cutting edge of cyber-health advances".
They will also trial the new healthcare identifiers regime, and will be first to electronically send hospital discharge summaries and referrals using national specifications, she said.
The Queensland government has already committed $1.2m in in-kind support to GP Partners, while NSW will commit the same amount for the Hunter trial.
In a twist of fate, the GP Partners' groundbreaking shared care summary system was originally developed by Brisbane-based Distributed Systems Technology Centre - a leading IT incubator under the Cooperative Research Centres program.
Former prime minister John Howard pumped hundreds of millions into research through the CRCs, which brought together researchers from industry and academia.
In the early 2000s, the DSTC built the Recordpoint system based on the publicly available openEHR architecture in conjunction with openEHR founder Ocean Informatics.
They hoped the technology would become a backbone for the proposed HealthConnect patient record-sharing network.
Now called the Health Record Exchange (HRX), the system was honed in HealthConnect trials and GP Partners has been operating the system for more than four years.
In 2005, The Australian was told openEHR was "the world's first method for accessing all of a patient's health records" regardless of how they were created or where they were stored across the health sector.
But when the incubator lost its funding at the end of 2005, DSTC spun-off its electronic health activities into a new company, Extensia Solutions, to protect the intellectual property rights. That same year Health Minister Tony Abbott pulled the plug on HealthConnect.
With more than 70 staff made redundant, a number - including former DSTC chair Ian Reinecke, former chief scientist Andy Bond and former chief executive Mark Gibson - ended up in key positions at the newly created NEHTA.
Two years ago, Mr Gibson left his post as chief information officer at NEHTA to return to Brisbane and lead further development of HRX on behalf of GP Partners.
Ownership of the HRX shared e-health record technology now lies with Extensia Solutions, and the software is used under licence.
Last month, Ms Roxon was briefed on the system's capabilities when GP Partners director Richard Kidd demonstrated HRX during her visit to his Nundah practice.
Dr Kidd canvassed Ms Roxon's support for GP Partners as a lead e-health site.
"We are confident HRX already provides an effective solution to some of the difficulties health providers face with regard to the sharing of patient information," he said then.
"While access to an e-health record is currently only available to GP patients (in the trial), we are looking to expand HRX access to other patient cohorts and geographical areas."
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 17.08.2010
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
