Useful Article in the Australian Financial Review

All,

Agnes King has had a conversation with the CEO of NEHTA the AFR is reporting. The article can be found here if you have subscription access.

In summary it suggests that after two years work NEHTA has developed the framework for the "unified national Health IT system" and that this framework will be released to the vendor community in the next few weeks.

These comments make it clear there will be little if any significant spend at the National level and that all vendors who hope for new sales will need to work with the states and territories where they are relevant and with GPs and private hospitals which are under less national of state control.

Issues of how any required changes in hospital and GP systems are to be paid for an so on are still unresolved in this article as are all the issues of information ownership, privacy and so on. It will be interesting to see just how practical and evolved the framework is when it is released.

One thing appears certain - the older concept of the national system of HealthConnect repositories which share summary records across the nation is well and truely dead.

We await the next installement with interest.

David