A National Health Policy Roundtable, which was hosted by the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association (AHHA) on Monday 21 April, delivered three comprehensive position papers to the Federal Minister of Health & Ageing's office, recommending a broad range of reforms across the spectrum of the health system.
"The three position papers covered the following critical areas for the future of our health system:
Data and Benchmarking;
Information Management; and
Service Integration.
"The event was a great success and achieved the overall goal of developing practical policy options that will make the health system safer, more efficient and more transparent to consumers," said Ms Prue Power, AHHA Executive Director.”
The important paper, from the perspective of the this blog is the Information Management paper.
Your blogger worked with Dr Michael Legg and Mr Richard Dixon-Hughes to draft this submission – assisted by a great number of excellent contributions from all sorts of experts – all listed in the document.
This all took days of voluntary non-paid effort on the part of all – and they all deserve a decent amount of thanks for the free contribution that was made.
A good read to see what I, and others, think we should be doing in e-Health in short term. The exception is the last recommendation, which was not discussed with the drafting group, and which I think needs a bit more thought.
The joint AHHA, HISA document can be found on the page identified here
http://www.aushealthcare.com.au/publications/publications_by_group.asp?id=3Enjoy.
David.
This is a good document. I commend its clarity about what needs to be done.
ReplyDeleteI noted the statements that the lack of a national standard for clinical messaging impairs the ability of GPs to provide safe quality care. This is certainly true, but I think that it is time to point out that many other health professionals are now using and starting to use electronic clinical systems. I know that medical specialists are rapidly changing away from paper-based records and because of this are now receiving pathology and medical imaging reports electronically, and are keen to communicate with referring doctors and other health professionals electronically. I would be helpful if future discussions acknowledeged this change in parts of the health professions other than general practice.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteCan I say it was our assumption that both GP and specialist document movement was critical and vital. I note that it might not have been as clear as you have stated it - but our intent was to cover all ambulatory practice.
Its needed everywhere!
David.