Do You Find These Final Claims Of Success From NEHTA Fair, Reasonable and Spin Free?

I thought I would extract part of the NEHTA CEO Report from the 2014-15 Annual Report. (Page 4 and 5). It is worth reading to see just how much truth and how much ‘spin’ you note!

CEO Report:

In 1998, Australian health ministers established the National Health Information Advisory Council to deliver a national action plan for health information. Health ministers, including Federal Health Minister Abbott, proposed an entity be established that was wholly owned by Australian governments (Commonwealth, State and Territory) to develop the ‘building blocks’ for eHealth: identifiers, authentication and terminology.

The formation of the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) was endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in 2005 and NEHTA was funded to deliver the foundations for future eHealth systems.

Over the past ten years, NEHTA has delivered the eHealth foundations in accordance with its charter. This has made it possible to deliver a national eHealth record system to achieve the vision of the Australian health ministers 15 years ago.

NEHTA’s purpose

NEHTA has a unique governance structure to fix a unique problem – how to connect and join the many information and data silos in our complex health system.

The NEHTA work program has been guided by the 2008 National eHealth Strategy, the 2009 Intergovernmental Agreement and the 2012 Memorandum of Understanding signed by all Australian governments. These documents comprised the core of the national foundation work – designing, building and operating the common identifiers, specifications and terminology to establish interoperability and connect healthcare providers and data sources.

The national foundations, the bedrock upon which a national eHealth system is built, have been delivered. The Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service, National Authentication Service for Health (NASH), clinical document specifications and other national foundations are all operational.

NEHTA’s achievements

NEHTA was set up to build the national infrastructure on behalf of the governments of Australia. Since delivering these components, NEHTA has turned its attention to increasing use of the infrastructure and embedding it in clinical practice. Usage of the national infrastructure exceeds anticipations for this point in the adoption curve:

• The HI Service processed 13 million transactions in May 2015, compared to 6-7million per month 12 months ago. This represents 13 million requests from software in healthcare organisations for an identifier for a patient, healthcare provider or a healthcare organisation (over 500,000 transactions a day in peak times).
•  National Terminology is now being embedded into clinical information systems. In Victorian hospitals we have already seen the Australian Medicines Terminology eliminate transcription errors and hand a 3% time efficiency gain to hospital pharmacists – 1.5 hours a week to spend on clinical work.
•  SNOMED has increased coded allergy documentation from 10-60% at the Sanitarium Hospital in Sydney. It is also used in hospitals in WA, ACT, Tasmania.
•  There are more than 350,000 products on the National Product Catalogue from 464 suppliers. Recallnet enables suppliers to share real-time product recall and withdrawal notifications with their trading partners and regulators in a secure and efficient manner; recall notifications which used to take several days now occur in under two hours.
• NEHTA undertook the design and specification work for the national eHealth record system funded directly by the federal government. Since it’s launch in 2012, NEHTA has played a supporting role in its operation, based on specifications maintenance and development, clinical safety work, and software integration work.
•  Secure Messaging Delivery (SMD) rollout has progressed, but more slowly than we would like. There are patches of good implementation: Tasmania has rolled out SMD to 80% of their GPs, and 88% of electronic discharge summaries are now being sent via SMD. Queensland Health are trialling an SMD solution that connects to the National Health Service Directory, also delivered as part of NEHTA’s work programme.
• The NASH commenced operation in 2012 and has issued over 8,000 certificates to healthcare provider individuals and over 12,000 certificates to healthcare organisations. This enables certificate holders to meet a high standard of authentication to view medical information including records from the eHealth record system.

NEHTA’s focus in 2015-16

NEHTA is now very good at what it does – and we are continually being contacted from around the world by others asking for help. Other countries see us as being ahead of the curve, which is a testament to the decade of hard work and continued investment by the governments of Australia.

In our final 12 months of operation, NEHTA is focused on driving meaningful use of the national infrastructure. The highways have been built; now we need to get the cars to drive them.

Our work programme is heavily directed to projects with jurisdictions to embed the national infrastructure in their day-to-day activities, with software vendors to stimulate further uptake, and with the pathology and diagnostic imaging sector to make those records available. NEHTA is also working to ensure the significant intellectual property and knowledge built up over the past ten years of investment is handed over to the Australian Commission for eHealth (ACeH), such that the Commission is well placed to lead national eHealth into the next phase.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Board for its support and guidance, and to recognise that without the hard work and efforts of the NEHTA management team, staff and clinical advisors we wouldn’t have achieved what we set out to do.

----- End Extract

The links that are relevant are here:

NEHTA's Annual Report 2014-15 is now available

Created on Monday, 09 November 2015

NEHTA's Annual Report 2014-15 is now available and can be downloaded from NEHTA ANNUAL REPORT 14-15 PDF (2.76 MB).

The National E-Health Transition Authority was established in 2005 by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to identify and jointly develop the necessary foundations and services – the building blocks – for a national eHealth infrastructure: 'NEHTA's WORK 2005-15' PDF (424.56 kB)

NEHTA is continuing to work with stakeholders on the widespread adoption and use of eHealth across the healthcare community until the Australian Commission for eHealth commences operations in July 2016.

NEHTA's Annual and Financial Reports contain detailed information about its operations during the past financial year as well as an overview of its work programme.

NEHTA is jointly funded by the Australian Government and all State and Territory Governments.

Link here:

http://www.nehta.gov.au/news-and-events/news/955-nehta-s-annual-report-2014-15-is-now-available

I am sure most readers would know what I think of many of the claims made - but let’s hear from readers. I look forward to your spin level rating - where all fact is rated 10 and all truth is 0!

David.