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."

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Here Is Another One That Seems To Have Slipped Out When No One Was Watching!

This appeared late last week.

Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) January 2015 Release 5 available for download

Created on Friday, 09 January 2015
NEHTA has released new specification sets and conformance requirements to enable Pathology and Diagnostic Imaging Reports to be uploaded to the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) by Pathology and Diagnostic Imaging service providers. These specifications support new capabilities in the PCEHR.
The Pathology and Diagnostic Imaging Reports can be used to share information about Pathology tests and Diagnostic Imaging examinations via an individual's PCEHR. These reports include a PDF which contain one or more examinations that are uploaded by the pathology or diagnostic imaging provider to the individual's PCEHR.
An additional new feature is the ability to download the Health Record Overview which can be displayed in local clinical information systems in whole or part. 
Presentation and Data Usage guidance documents have been developed for vendors presenting the Pathology Report, Diagnostic Imaging Report views and also the Health Record Overview in clinical information systems.
NEHTA has also updated a number of technical specifications to support the new capability:
The specification sets can be downloaded from the NEHTA website:
For more detailed information, please refer to the following release notes. Download:
Here is the link to the relevant page:
What surprised me with all this was that I had not, to date, seen minutes that confirm that all the stakeholders involved in results upload and use had agreed how it is to work.
Has anyone seen the final view from Government in all this?
If it does not exist one wonders how such specifications can be finalised.
Isn’t it also wonderful to see that in NEHTA’s view the PCEHR is going to become a large collection of .pdfs. Talk about back to the future.
David.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess it depends if agreement is meAsured through being in a room for a power point briefing by some young Archutect, then signed off by a couple of DoH types and their CHIKO, NeHTA CEO and his trusty national design manager, pen and ink supplied by the CHF

http://www.pulseitmagazine.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2238:electronic-orders-a-stumbling-block-for-pcehr-pathology-reports&catid=16:australian-ehealth&Itemid=328

Anonymous said...

That NEHTA have defined various specifications for how a report will appear in the PCEHR does not necessarily mean that how and when such reports will be sent to the PCEHR has been agreed. Nor is it any guarantee that such reports will be sent.

Anonymous said...

'Isn’t it also wonderful to see that in NEHTA’s view the PCEHR is going to become a large collection of .pdfs. Talk about back to the future'. Wonder how the users will feel opening five or six separate pdfs to check a how patient's INR or HbA1c trend is going. Can't se much popular uptake.

Anonymous said...

Can someone please remind me who exactly is meant to be using the PCEHR clinically, and how it is specifically designed to meet those clinical needs?

Dr Ian Colclough said...

The PCEHR hasn't been specifically designed to meet clinical needs so anyone using it will not be doing so for clinical decision making purposes.

Moving on. There are a good number of clinical desktop vendors providing excellent facilities for capturing, recording and retrieving a patient's current medical data.

There are also some very large organisations, like Telstra, firmly convinced they can do even better by acquiring a mix of software vendors and gluing them all together in some mysterious way.

The underlying question however, which has oft been asked but never adequately answered, is what strategies are needed to arrive at a viable, clinically useful, ubiquitous, secure, reliable, current, person-centered health record; one which is acceptable and accessible to all health professionals and their patients.

Anonymous said...

Just because there are vendor systems that can support clinical tasks using well structured data, if the data provided by the PCEHR is not in a form that is able to support those functions, so what?

Can I do something as simple as automatically draw a time line of BP measures automatically using PCEHR data? Are you aware of reliable screen scraping methods that these vendor systems can use that can pull out a series of values for a given measure from a series of pdfs, and safely and reliably convert them to atomic values that can be then used in a clinical setting?

If not (and that is the case I think), then the question remains - for which clinical tasks is the PCEHR fit for purpose? If the answer is none, then what is it doing at all?