NEHTA Needs to Get the Australian Medicines Terminology Finished. It is Two Years Late!

This appeared a few days ago:

AUSTRALIAN MEDICINES TERMINOLOGY RELEASE 2.0

Release Note

30 June 2009

AMT Statement of Purpose

The Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT) has been developed to be fit for the purpose of unambiguously identifying for clinicians and computer systems all TGA identified 'Registrable' medicines marketed in Australia and is therefore available to be represented in acute sector clinical information systems for the following activities:

* Prescribing

* Recording

* Review

* Supply

* Administration and

* Communication of the above in a Discharge Summary.

While systems developers and end users might choose to deploy AMT or information generated from AMT enabled systems for purposes other than those described, no assessment with regards to fitness for purpose has been made by NEHTA.

As far as contents we have this:

“The June 2009 release of AMT contains all the Australian marketed products that are included on the Schedule of Pharmaceutical Benefits including the Repatriation Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (RPBS). The AMT now includes Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) nutritional supplements, diagnostic agents, dressings, bandages, influenza vaccines for 2009 and most Standard Formula Preparations.

A number of radiographic agents, multivitamins, some gases and skin moisturisers have been included with this release bringing the number of products in AMT to more than 10 000.

More PBS items will routinely be added to the AMT through monthly updates to the Schedule of Pharmaceutical Benefits.

Over the next month further “Registered” and “Listed” items from the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG) will be added to the AMT as part of the monthly release cycle.”

What that means is that many non-PBS listed medicines are still not included. This can be a little annoying if you are using SNOMED to code medications

This sequence of releases has been going on since when?

Here you go:

MEDICINES TERMINOLOGY – RELEASE 1

Release Notes

2 April 2007

NEHTA publishes Release 1 of the Australian Medicines Terminology for review.

That is well over 2 years.

Further on we note:

“Release 1 incorporates comments received at NEHTA’s Medications Workshop held in March 2006; comments received from software vendors and health departments on an earlier version of the technical specification; and the needs of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Branch of the Department of Health and Ageing (the PBB).”

Now according to a presentation at HIC06 (22 August, 2006) the status was:

Australian Medicines Terminology: Under Development

- Proof of concept: complete

- demonstration tool

- Terminology specification complete

- Draft for comment released at HIC Aug 2006

-UML Model

-Technical Specification

- First release:

- Limited set of codes to PBS for Pharmbiz project August 2006

- All PBS products January 2007

- Extend to all TGA registered medicines June 2007

- High risk/ high use other TGA listed products June 2007

So two years after it was meant to be done it still isn’t. Why one asks is this?

This project is now beyond overdue and into the ridiculous. Maybe it would be a plan to actually publish a roadmap and resource plan that shows how this is going to reach the stage of just requiring updates as things change? Sorry, I forgot this is the secrecy riddled NEHTA so we can forget that! Surely users who propose to use the AMT deserve better than this?

With all this delay and inaction we also have a few other issues emerging. I am hearing about at least some data quality issues and we know NEHTA is still saying what they have is not fit for purpose! I wonder when that is going to be fixed?

If you want to play around with where the state of the data is you can look here:

http://australia.healthbase.info/amt/

This is courtesy of Dr Eric Browne and is worth a browse. I understand NEHTA is in a bit of denial that this actually exists and does not encourage awareness of its existence.

Additionally the confusion between the objectives of the AMT and the NPC are leading to issues with both the development and deployment of both.

All this really is not good enough!

David.