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, June 29, 2016

Talk About Kicking The Can Down The Road! NEHTA Goes Out With A Whimper.

We had a few releases from NEHTA last week:

NEHTA Software Developer Community announcement - Updates of Sample Code Libraries for Clinical Documents, Secure Messaging and My Health Record system

Created on Thursday, 23 June 2016
NEHTA Integration Products are pleased to announce the publication of maintenance updates for the following sample code libraries.
  • Clinical Document Library - .NET Sample Code v4.3.0
  • My Health Record B2B Client Library - .NET Sample Code v1.0.5
  • My Health Record B2B Client Library – Schema WSDL v4.0.0
  • HL7™ MDM Library - .NET Sample Code v1.0.7
The updates address a number of known issues that are detailed in their respective release notes.
Vendors are encouraged to incorporate the updated versions of these libraries into their software, as this can prevent a number of potential issues.
Download
The updated sample code libraries and associated release notes are included in the following updated end products:
Feedback
We value your feedback and encourage questions, comments or suggestions about our products. Please email Help Centre, or call us on 1300 901 001.

NEHTA Software Developer Community Announcement - Personal Health Notes, Advance Care Document Custodian and Personal Health Summary

Created on Monday, 20 June 2016
The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) has published updates to the following consumer end products.
Personal Health Notes, Advance Care Document Custodian and Personal Health Summary are documents that may be created by consumer portals such as the national consumer portal for the My Health Record system.
The My Health Record programme has identified specific use cases where the author of consumer documents may not have an individual healthcare identifier (IHI). For example, a care agency worker may add an advance care document to the My Health Record system on behalf of a healthcare consumer. The revised conformance profiles allow for the use of a care agency employee identifier in these circumstances. That identifier is a 16 digit identifier similar to an IHI. Product components of these end products have been updated to support this.
The related template package libraries and the template package directory have been updated to refer to the new versions of the conformance profiles.
These changes have also resulted in the archiving of the Common – Consumer Entered Information.
Further, the Common – Continuity of Care end product has been archived. The content of this product has been transferred to Common – Clinical Documents.
Who does this affect?
Developers should consider if their software needs to be tested or revised to allow for consumer documents containing a care agency employee identifier instead of an IHI for the document author.
There are no new document rendering requirements associated with care agency employee identifiers and software systems using version 1.2.9 of NEHTA's generic clinical document style sheet, published here, will render documents containing a care agency employee identifier.
If you have any questions or require further information, please call the NEHTA Help Centre on 1300 901 001.
Thank you for your continued support.

NEHTA Releases Version 6 of the eHealth Integration Sample Code

Created on Monday, 20 June 2016
NEHTA Integration Products is pleased to announce this version of the eHealth Integration Sample Code (eHISC) lets you upload pathology and diagnostic imaging reports to the My Health Record system without needing to generate CDA™ documents.
eHISC v6.0 automatically converts HL7™ v2 ORU messages into eHealth Pathology Report and eHealth Diagnostic Imaging Report CDA documents and uploads them to the My Health Record system.
The conversion capability supports ORU messages containing a PDF version of the diagnostic report. The resulting CDA documents do not contain any structured report information but instead refer to the PDF document, which is extracted from the ORU message and attached to the CDA document.
eHISC accepts ORU messages via both its SOAP web service interface and its new low-level MLLP interface. MLLP offers an easy-to-use integration path, as it is already widely supported by existing laboratory and radiology information system implementations.
Download
eHISC v6.0 is available for download from the NEHTA website, subject to the licence terms in the Source Code Software Package and the Binary Software Package.
Please download the new release from the NEHTA website:
Feedback
We value your feedback and encourage questions, comments or suggestions about our products. Please email the NEHTA Help Centre, or call us on 1300 901 001.
Kind regards,
NEHTA Integration Products
*Join the My Health Record developer community today by subscribing to the My Health Record Developer Mailing List here and registering with the My Health Record Developer Website here.
----- End Extracts:
The second item is amazing to me. I thought we were all issued with an IHI when the Health Identifier system started. If this is the case – then why do carers need another one? Besides I am rather keen on the idea that we are pretty certain just who is entering material into the myHR – rather than just allowing a new number to be created. This all seems like a huge, and potentially a medico-legally messy and unsafe solution – or am I missing the point.
In the third outing NEHTA just confirms that they have given up and that pathology and radiology in the myHR will be a pile of .pdfs.
Really just hopeless! I wonder will the ADHA do any better – having inherited all this nonsense.
David.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know, David. Healthcare providers have a HPI-I for interacting with the system in a professional capacity, and their IHI to use as a consumer. Having a different, non-IHI for authors who are not the patient and have no HPI-I follows this same model. The presence of more than one IHI in a document might also be a potential source of confusion or mis-matching.

Dr Ian Colclough said...

With some justification I think David said "This all seems like a huge, and potentially a medico-legally messy and unsafe solution – or am I missing the point."

I don't know either David. From a clinician's perspective I find this quite bewildering; as a systems and business analyst more than a little disturbing.

Anonymous said...

Oh yes, Ian, I agree with that. I'd be interested to see what is involved in obtaining one of these new "carer" identifiers, and what restrictions and responsibilities go with it. Anyone with a HPI-I is accountable to their board at AHPRA - I wonder how carers might be held accountable?

Anonymous said...

NEHTA just confirms that ..... pathology and radiology in the myHR will be a pile of .pdfs.

Well a stack of pathology PDFs piled one on top of another won't be nearly as bulky as what we were used to with the manual paper record a long time ago. How do these reports get filed? By test result or date or both? Chronologically, with the most recent at the top of the pile? Can I sort the reports? Can I graph, chart and tabulate the results? Hopefully this new technology will be a big improvement on my practice's patient computer record.

Anonymous said...

I think it's called desperation, if we let enough people accesses it, someone is bound to access it surely? Interesting it is still only a couple of products that get updated not the whole package, must be struggling to find the skill sets required or have ended up with lazy and ignored managers.

Anonymous said...

Today's farewell announcement from NEHTA is deceitful and misleading. It said "from 1 July 2016, NEHTA will become the Australian Digital Health Agency."

It should have said - "from 1 July 2016 NEHTA is closing down and its work will now be undertaken by the Australian Digital Health Agency."

Anonymous said...

NEHTA always did live in a world of its own.