Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Thursday, March 04, 2010

A Sudden Out Break of Commonsense at NEHTA! A Bit Late I Reckon.

The following appeared a few days ago.

Peter Fleming- National E Health Transition Authority CEO

MEDICAL providers should receive some incentives to pick up and use the planned national healthcare identifier program to compensate for costs and drive new ways of providing healthcare, Peter Fleming says.

"It's important that we take a holistic perspective around the change process," he says. "One of the issues in the past, and it's not unique to health, is that we tend to implement IT systems but don't derive the full benefits.

"Technology is the tip of the iceberg here, and we need to look more broadly at how processes could and should be adopted to ultimately lead to far more collaborative forms of medicine."

Fleming says a case for financial incentives to encourage primary care use of national health identity numbers has been put to Nehta's board.

Meanwhile, a mobile version of the "model health community" built by Nehta and health identifier operator Medicare Australia will soon take to the road, "so people around the country can get a feel for it".

Fleming says Medicare completed testing of the HI system in a pre-production environment before Christmas.

The system was initially loaded with 98 per cent of the population's details obtained from the Medicare and Veterans Affairs customer registries. "Release two of that environment takes care of automation of some back-office functionality for Medicare and puts in place the capacity to capture information from the other

2 per cent of the population," he says.

"That will be finished and tested by the end of March.

"Release three will take feeds from the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme.

"This work is on track, and medical providers' information will be available to us by June."

More good news here:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/peter-flemming-national-e-health-transistion-authority-ceo/story-fn51e41l-1225833146016

As readers will know we have just run a poll on this. And the view is that the HI Service is a ‘dead duck’ without something of this sort!

See here:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2010/03/aushealthit-man-poll-number-10-results.html

On the other points raised in the interview we must be all very pleased that everything is going so well. It sounds as though it is all ‘tickety-boo”!

All will become clear in the next few months I am sure – especially with the release of the e-Health component of the National Health Reform Plan some time before the COAG meeting on April 11 (+/- 1 day).

I wonder what the chance of the plan having some incentive funding to help NEHTA is? One also wonders if more money is to be applied, just how appropriate NEHTA remains to administer such a program.

I am certainly hopeful we will see a changed governance and leadership framework out of the e-Health announcement.

David.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"The system was initially loaded with 98 per cent of the population's details obtained from the Medicare and Veterans Affairs customer registries."
Well that's interesting! Isn't the HI Legislation required to authorise this? So has NEHTA/ Medicare loaded information in clear breach of Medicare's charter?

"Release three will take feeds from the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme.
This work is on track, and medical providers' information will be available to us by June." More BS from Mr Fleming. The HI Service has a dependency on data from AHPRA but at this stage the two projects are not aligned and the dependency cannot be met.