This Looks To Be A Very Interesting Step Forward For E-Health In Oz and NZ. It Seems To Be Really Working.

This release appeared a few days ago.

MEDIA RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

2 February 2016

HealthLink announces the launch of SmartForms

One of the worst kept secrets in the health IT industry has now been publicly confirmed.  HealthLink’s new SmartForms solution is being implemented across all the major practice management platforms and electronic medical records systems in Australia and New Zealand.  HealthLink already has its eyes firmly on a service launch in British Columbia in the not too distant future. 

HealthLink’s SmartForms solution is currently being rolled out across HealthLink’s 13,500 site network.  Almost all of the major EMR systems across Australia and New Zealand have implemented SmartForms or are in the process of doing so.

·         Best Practice     

·         Cloud Appointments

·         Genie

·         Gensolve

·         Houston Medical

·         IntraHealth (windows and Macintosh)

·         MedTech (Medtech32 and Evolution)

·         Medical Director

·         My Practice

·         Peak Software

SmartForms technology has already been developed and implemented across much of New Zealand’s health system over the past five years.  It is being used for a number of purposes including electronic hospital referrals, specialist and allied health referrals, health insurance forms, as well as pathology and radiology service requesting.  The number of SmartForms being sent each month continues to climb.  In November, General Practices sent 170,000 SmartForms. 

One of HealthLink’s key advantages is a close working relationship with the electronic medical record (EMR) vendor community across Australia and New Zealand.  HealthLink works closely with each of these companies as a neutral party and is therefore able to sort out interoperability issues and problems.  HealthLink also funds some of the EMR vendors’ development activities and works closely with their support teams to develop services collaboratively.”

“We are delighted that Australia and New Zealand’s largest electronic medical records vendors have incorporated SmartForms as a key feature within their latest product releases.”

Key to the steady emergence of SmartForms as a robust and dependable industry solution is the Aduro Interface specification.   Aduro is a standards based framework for exchange of clinical information on a large scale is the objective of the Aduro Alliance which is being set up to promote use of the Aduro specification.  For further information please visit www.aduroalliance.com

----- End Release.
More at http://www.healthlink.net/en_AU/

It is good to know the underlying specs are moving to the FHIR approach - which may well turn out to be a very important way forward in the future.

I look forward to hearing from users about their experiences!

David.