The Transition Authority received some $110m in base funding for e-health standards work between January 2011 and June 2012, plus separate Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record contracts worth $90m from the Department of Health.
A third tranche of these funds is due in October.
This contrasts with just under $200m for four private-sector projects including the building of the system, three lead implementations and nine e-health pilots to be finished in the same period.
Only $2.3m has been allocated to help local software providers redevelop their products through the Transition Authority's GP desktop panel.
The authority's funding and spending have come under scrutiny in the Senate from Queensland Liberal Sue Boyce.
Senator Boyce is still waiting for Health to answer 11 questions on notice relating to the PCEHR program due by July 22.
An authority spokeswoman brushed off concerns that the organisation still had been developing specifications when the government selected contractors to build the system using existing products and standards.
The Accenture-led consortium will receive $77m for delivering the national infrastructure in time for Health Minister Nicola Roxon's deadline for a working system.
The authority spokeswoman said it was "contributing to an eventual PCEHR for Australia through high-level e-health architectures and blueprints, and determining the 'baseline' for the implementation and development of e-health solutions".
"The PCEHR is based on standards, and will leverage relevant international and Australian specifications to ensure an interoperable solution is achieved, to minimise the complexity and cost of adoption within the sector," she said. "The NEHTA standards catalogue is in production, and will be available in the coming months."
However, Standards Australia stopped work on more than 60 technical standards needed for the $500m program in July, after Health cut funding.
Yesterday, a Standards Australia spokesman said the organisation was in "the last stages of finalising an agreement".
A revised version of the PCEHR concept of operations is yet to be released.
Base funding for NEHTA's program, last agreed by the Council of Australian Governments in late 2008, was $218m for the three years from July 2009 to June 2012, in a 50-50 split between the federal and state governments.
In September 2009, the Department of Health granted the Authority $136m for the period to June 2012, "to develop critical specifications, infrastructure, software and systems".
A Health spokeswoman said the $90m in new money for the Authority was being "paid progressively, on the basis of activity" over the period.
"Specifically, this year, NEHTA delivered, and will provide future maintenance of the high-level architecture for the PCEHR including the concept of operations, business blueprint, business use cases and operational requirements," she said.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 30.08.2011
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