Accenture's local health and public service head, Cable says he's not fazed by the complexity and tight deadline for delivery of the national system.
"If we hadn't had experience doing e-health records elsewhere it would be quite daunting," he said.
"But (federal Health Minister) Nicola Roxon noted they'd looked to select us based on our track record and what we bring is fundamental to being able to meet what they want and in that timeframe."
Last week, the Gillard government gave an Accenture-led consortium that includes Oracle, Orion Health and Telstra contracts totalling $77m for the build of its personally controlled e-health record program.
Roxon has repeatedly promised that the PCEHR will be operational by July 1 next year.
Cable says the team hit the ground running by leveraging its experience in Singapore, where the consortium recently completed the first phase of the island nation's $140m EHR rollout.
However, Australia will not be getting a cookie-cutter copy.
"We're not just lifting the Singaporean system and saying 'this is it' for Australia," Cable says.
"Obviously we are using similar products - Orion's portals and Oracle's databases - but the personal control aspect requires a different approach.
"Recognising that, we've been investing and developing our assets in readiness for the project." Cable says the government has been "quite explicit about what they require me to produce for them".
"I'm not going to say these things are simple; the project won't be without its challenges," he says.
"But our experience certainly gives us a good foundation."
Accenture has first to create a central indexing system and then drive its integration with healthcare systems nationwide, so that information can be quickly pulled up from myriad local repositories.
"Building an Oracle database back-end enables us to be open architecture, and Accenture will use its own assets to integrate with disparate systems in an open and standard way," Cable says.
"We've had a good look at that; we pretty much understand the feeder systems.
"We need to make the process as simple as possible, so the system is very effective in collecting the required indexing data."
The government has planned for a progressive implementation approach, allowing time to resolve issues that arise as the various players come on board.
"If you tried to touch every aspect of healthcare data in every healthcare system in every state at once and tried to load and index it - that would be beyond a challenge," Cable says.
"But the key pieces of health information - health event and discharge summaries - will be available in the initial version."
Access to the records will be obtained through two portals - one for patients and the other for medical professionals - sitting on top of the indexing system.
Meanwhile, Telstra will supply the data hosting and related services through its cloud computing facilities.
"We're providing the department with a facility through Telstra, which is our partner in this space," Cable says.
"That means they don't have to establish a data centre base themselves.
"Instead, they can consume infrastructure services as they need them, and they only pay for what they use."
As Telstra's data centres are based within Australia, "there's no problem with personal medical information being sent offshore".
Cable says it's refreshing to see the government moving to adopt the utility computing model.
"There's a very detailed set of expectations about this," he says.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 23.08.2011
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