The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) halted the rollout of primary care desktop software at 10 trial sites on Friday blaming incompatibility with the national specifications.
It is the latest blow for the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) project, which has attracted $466 million in federal funding over two years and is considered vital to efforts to combat preventible and chronic disease.
The national specifications were updated in November and the problems, which have not been detailed, affect most of the Wave 1 and Wave 2 sites: Metro North Brisbane Medicare Local, Inner East Melbourne Medicare Local, Hunter Urban Medicare Local, Accoras in Brisbane South, Greater Western Sydney, St Vincent and Mater Health Sydney, Calvary Health Care ACT, Cradle Coast Electronic Health Information Exchange in Tasmania, the Northern Territory Department of Health and Families, and Brisbane's Mater Misericordiae Health Services.
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Only the Medibank Private and Fred IT group sites are unaffected. The Defence Department's Joint e-Health Data and Information also appears to be safe.
NEHTA is expected to renegotiate contracts, keen to salvage what it can from the trial, and determine how to migrate data across to the national system which is due to go live on July 1.
A NEHTA spokesman would not answer specific questions about the issue, but confirmed it was "pausing implementation of the primary care desktop software development".
"NEHTA is acting after internal checks detected issues in the latest release of its specifications in November 2011," he said.
"This is about quality control to ensure absolute confidence in the software being used in the e-Health pilot sites. One of the reasons for having these sites was to test software and "iron out the bugs' prior to the national infrastructure going live."
The spokesman said NEHTA, which was jointly funded by the commonwealth, state and territory governments, was working with the pilot sites and the primary care software vendors to "recalibrate their acclivity within the e-Health program".
"The pilot site and national infrastructure projects have operated in parallel, but neither is a critical dependency for the other project," he said.
"In large projects of this scale, it is not unusual for problems of this type to arise. We are working to manage this situation to ensure the program is delivered."
Australian Medical Association president Steve Hambleton -- whose Brisbane clinic is in one of the affected sites -- said the issue would cause further disruption for practices.
"It's inevitable when you have a national framework for data you will have some sites that are incompatible. The challenge now is how to migrate that data across," Dr Hambleton said.
He said properly introduced PCEHRs would have significant benefits, although the government had yet to address the issue of funding for doctors, who would be responsible for updating and maintaining the records.
The Australian last week revealed the government would provide Medicare with another $34m to upgrade its Healthcare Identifier service.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Sean Parnell
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 24.01.2012
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