The National e-Health Transition Authority established the plan to fast-track delivery of critical standards needed for the PCEHR infrastructure build and by the lead implementation sites, ahead of next year's July 1 start date.
Health department chief executive Paul Madden has told The Australian the tiger teams are confident they can sign-off the first round of specs "as ready to build" by October 31, and have the rest finalised and reviewed by the end of next month.
But a leaked document calling for participation by members of Standards Australia's expert IT-014 committees shows only three teams have been established to date - Repository Services, e-Health Interoperability Architecture and Consolidated View.
A second View team is expected to be operational by the third week in November, according to an updated list of PCEHR tiger teams released on Monday.
The Repository team has its first meeting on Friday, Interoperability will meet next Monday while the View team has listed November 7 for its first session.
The Australian understands SA volunteers and industry members have been slow to sign-up for the Nehta-led process, over concerns about going outside normal standards processes.
Mr Madden has confirmed the intention is to take the finalised technical specifications through the full SA process for publication as Australian Standards.
When the tiger team approach was announced earlier this month, a software industry source warned that the plan was flawed, and could harm the financial viability of local firms.
Mr Madden rejected these concerns, telling Senate estimates last week that "it was our complete expectation that those specifications will continue their normal track through the standards-setting process and they’ll emerge somewhere around July 2012".
The Australian understands members of SA's IT-014 committees had not heard of the tiger teams prior to this month.
They remain unhappy that the approach "ignores formal standards procedures" that result in "implementable, rigorously tested outcomes", according to an industry source.
"Standards organisations have to follow specific rules, there are regulations around notice of meetings for example, and these are being ignored," he said.
"It's an iterative process where a committee develops a draft, the draft goes out for public comment, the comments and concerns are addressed by the committee and then the document is put out for further comment.
"Sometimes, experts are brought in to deal with particular issues, so all the problems get resolved before publication as an official standard."
The source said the only standard created by Nehta proceeding towards publication, for secure messaging, "required hundreds and hundreds of hours of reworking" by industry volunteers to make it useable.
Work to be done by the Repository team covers storage and access to health information, including drawing information from other sources "appropriate to the PCEHR".
The View teams will look at how data is viewed in the professional and consumer portals, which bring together the shared health summary and other event summaries such as hospital discharge reports.
The Interoperability team will draft the architecture framework and e-health service specifications, based on a Services Oriented Architecture.
Mr Madden said the national infrastructure build has been ruled out of scope for specifications, as the Accenture-led consortium would deliver the portals, call centre systems, B2B gateways, core services and templates using existing and available standards.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 25.10.2011
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