This popped up last week:
Health to build national data exchange for prescription tracking
By Justin Hendry on Jun 21, 2018 6:54AM
For real-time monitoring system.
The Department of Health will establish a national data exchange for transferring prescription information between states and territories in real-time.
The exchange is the first piece of work for the national prescription monitoring system, which was funded with $16.4 million last year to target the misuse of certain prescription drugs.
The system will be used to instantly alert pharmacists and doctors if a patient has previously been supplied with prescription-only medicines that contain morphine, oxycodone, dexamphetamine and alprazolam.
Patient history information will be pulled from both “prescribing and dispensing systems” and “jurisdictional regulatory systems” to inform decision making.
“Key information such as patient history will indicate whether patients have received permission from the regulator to access target drugs, and whether any of these drugs have recently been dispensed to patients,” tender documents state.
“This will be provided in real time to the clinician making the decision to prescribe or dispense these medicines.”
But to do this a national data exchange (NDE) is required to enable integration with existing systems and allow users to interface with the real time prescription monitoring (RTPM) system.
“The NDE component uses the prescription dispensing events from all states and territories to prevent cross-border drug shopping abuses.”
“The NDE component will allow regulators, doctors and pharmacists, as well as other system users to interface directly with the national RTPM system from their existing clinician software.”
More here, including that the project is to be done by July 2019.
With the tender out we can only sit back and wait and see how it plays out.
David.
"a national data exchange (NDE)"
ReplyDeleteWill this require interoperability built upon a national secure messaging system?
Or will it be another data island that requires interfacing with all those other systems?
What we really need is a National Digital Health strategy that deals with all these other systems, such as RTPM, cancer registries, health provider systems, pathology systems, bowel cancer screening, organ transplant registers etc etc.
A good starting point would be a business process architecture and a high level information architecture. You know, the sort of architectures that should have been developed ages ago by NEHTA but weren't.
For those late to the party, some time last year, I questioned NEHTA's approach of using a Concept of Operations as the fundamental starting point for the system.
I pointed out
https://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2017/03/one-groups-view-of-range-of-steps-to.html?showComment=1488488893285#c4245498299101731657
that NEHTA's use of the terms conceptual, logical and physical was not consistent with best practice Information Systems architecture, one commenters response included:
"Conceptual ... Logical ... Physical(implantable). Anyone in manufacturing or construction (be it highways or software) would recognise the Owner's requirements, the Engineer's design and the Manufacturing Engineer's design ... conceptually what you are trying to produce ... logically how it would be designed ... and physically how you intend to build it."
https://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2017/03/one-groups-view-of-range-of-steps-to.html?showComment=1488494182387#c6485227254954689172
As soon as someone made the decision to use an approach designed for manufacturing or construction, myhr was doomed.
If the RTPM initiative uses the same approach, the same result will ensue.
Bernard the reference to conceptual logical implementable (viewpoints) is based on HL7 SAIF, the language is derived from Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing. In the context of these the term makes sense. NEHTA never quite did Platform specific as their role was to try and design specifications than numerous and independent solutions could be designed and build from. Using commonly agreed conformance points to enable interoperable opportunities. What happened ? The Pointless Canberra Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) now named after a department store MyEHR
ReplyDeleteVictoria is developing a RTPM system, SafeScript. The Federal Government is duplicating it by developing its own RTPM!!
ReplyDeleteWhy does Australia need to have TWO RTPM's?
$30 million for the Vic system, $16 million for the Federal system has been budgeted.
Is this not the definition of Insanity?
The icing on the cake will be that Victoria ends up 85 million and the federal one ending up around the 300 million mark.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a problem with the terms conceptual, logical and implementable, just the way they were defined and used in the PCEHR architecture document.
ReplyDeleteIn the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (and other similar architectural modelling techniques) each viewpoint has a conceptual view, a logical view and an implementable view. In other words, they are orthogonal.
In most modern enterprise architecture development methodologies (e.g. TOGAF) there are three viewpoints: Business, Applications and Physical.
The developers of the PCEHR architecture totally mis-understood an article by John Zachman (https://www.zachman.com/ea-articles-reference/58-conceptual-logical-physical-it-is-simple-by-john-a-zachman) where he said:
"Conceptual ... Logical ... Physical. Anyone in manufacturing or construction would recognize the Owner's requirements, the Engineer's design and the Manufacturing Engineer's design ... conceptually what you are trying to produce ... logically how it would be designed ... and physically how you intend to build it."
The Zachman Framework used "real" architecture and design as metaphor. Information Systems/Technology and the architecture and modelling worlds have moved on significantly since then. The PCEHR architects should have read the rest of the Zachman article and, more importantly, understood what Zachman was saying. It is obvious they didn't.
If you are really interested, I wrote an article "Beyond the Zachman framework: Problem-oriented system architecture" which was published in 2012, in the IBM systems journal on the 25th anniversary of Zachman's original article.
A copy is here http://www.drbrd.com/docs/Problem-orientedSystemArchitecture.pdf
ReplyDelete"Why does Australia need to have TWO RTPM's?"
Why does every GP have to have TWO eHR systems, their own and the government's?
Is this not the definition of stupidity?