It Looks To Me NEHTA is Being Excluded from the Personally Controlled EHR Project.

I thought I would wander along to the NEHTA web site to see just what was available on the PCEHR given the dearth of information available from DoHA.

I have discussed what we had a few weeks ago, during the election campaign, here:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2010/07/we-have-utter-madness-afoot-at-doha.html

Here is what I found from NEHTA:

http://www.nehta.gov.au/coordinated-care/whats-in-pcehr

What is a PCEHR?

A Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) is a secure, electronic record of your medical history, stored and shared in a network of connected systems. The PCEHR will bring key health information from a number of different systems together and present it in a single view.

Information in a PCEHR will be able to be accessed by you and your authorised healthcare providers. With this information available to them, healthcare providers will be able to make better decisions about your health and treatment advice. Over time you will be able to contribute to your own information and add to the recorded information stored in your PCEHR.

The PCEHR will not hold all the information held in your doctor's records but will complement it by highlighting key information. In the future, as the PCEHR becomes more widely available, you will be able to access your own health information anytime you need it and from anywhere in Australia.

IEHR General

Documents

Public Opinion Poll - IEHR (07/11/2008)

NEHTA Consultation Report (14/10/2008)

IEHR Fact Sheet

Documents

Individual Electronic Health Record Fact Sheet (04/07/2008)

IEHR Context and Strategic Direction

Documents

Standards for E-Health Interoperability v1.0 (08/05/2007)

Review of Shared Electronic Health Records Standards v1.0 (21/02/2006)

IEHR Archived

http://www.nehta.gov.au/coordinated-care/benefits-of-an-pcehr

Benefits of a PCEHR

The Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) will greatly enhance both the quality and the timeliness of available healthcare information, delivering substantial benefits to you, your healthcare provider and the healthcare system as a whole.

More specific benefits of PCEHRs include:

• assisting the self-management of stable chronic diseases (for example, high blood pressure, diabetes and asthma)
• increasing communication between clinicians and individuals by using e-consultations and online services to support self-care management using broadband services and online records to share relevant health information
• reducing hospital re-admissions by making accessible timely and accurate health information essential to the better coordination of post-hospital care
• improving use of scarce resources through better quality health information, faster clinical assessments, more accurate diagnoses and referrals, and more effective treatment and prescribing of medication
• better decision making by healthcare providers and individuals through the availability of more complete, more accurate and more up-to-date health information
• better policy development as a result of the high quality data potentially available for use in research and planning.

----- End Extract.

It is really hard to know why it would be that a (even the) major e-health initiative would be announced, NEHTA would update the headings on its web site and have no new information since November, 2008 on their web-site.

As for that benefits list, will patient controlled information actually be useful, trustworthy and complete enough to be useful? I somehow doubt it.

The NEHTA Blueprint was also essentially silent on the PCEHR– saying essentially ‘watch this space’!

I wonder what will flow from our new Government! We really are entitled to know what is going on with all this!

David.