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, March 11, 2020

I Have To Say This Release From The ADHA Has Me Somewhat Stumped!

This appeared a day or so ago.

National Digital Health Strategy March updates

04 March 2020: The Service Registration Assistant and the Child Digital Health Record proof of concept are coming soon.

Service Registration Assistant (SRA)

The new Service Registration Assistant – now in the evaluation phase – can reduce paperwork, keep healthcare practice details accurate and improve patient outcomes and experiences. It offers immediate benefits for healthcare organisations by reducing the burden of needing to complete the same details across many different forms.
The Service Registration Assistant supports an integrated experience through clinical information systems that use the FHIR API or through the SRA portal for non-integrated users.
The SRA has two key roles. Namely:
  • Publisher (organisation who wishes to share their details)
  • Subscriber (external service or directory who wishes to receive publisher details)
Production use began in late 2019 and completion of the release will incorporate features required for the proof of concept. The participants and the current update of their involvement includes:

  • Best Practice (Publisher: Integrated CIS) – enhanced software released for use
  • CorePlus (Publisher: Integrated CIS) – development in progress
  • Healthlink (Subscriber) – development completed, final stages of onboarding
  • Telstra Health (Subscriber) – development completed, final stages of onboarding
  • HealthDirect (Subscriber) – SRA/NHSD solution details being finalised
  • SONIC Healthcare (Subscriber) – planning phase
  • Northern NSW Local Health District (Publisher & Subscriber) – development completed, final stages of onboarding
North Coast PHN is leading the ‘on the ground’ work. Through engagement and support activities, they’re assisting participating organisations to register and use the solution. To date, 20 organisations have registered throughout Northern NSW.

What’s next?

The project is currently in the recruitment phase. The Agency is focused on onboarding additional subscriber companies and progressing with the engagement of participating organisations. Our target is to have one hundred organisations onboard, as this will help us gauge the value and viability of the solution.
After determining the level of success in April, a business case supporting the national scaling may be developed for decision-making by June 2020.

Child Digital Health Record (0 to 4 years) proof of concept

The Agency, eHealth NSW and the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network have together created the Children’s Digital Health Collaborative. The collaboration is focused on improving the health and wellbeing of Australian children and young people through the use of digital technologies.
It has engaged with over 1,000 participants including:
  • Consumers
  • Clinicians
  • Health and social care provider organisations
  • Researchers
  • Jurisdictions
  • Information and communication technology industry partners
The Collaborative is co-designing, implementing and evaluating proof of concepts for the following national initiatives in support of children’s health and wellbeing:
  • Next generation scalable interoperability platform
  • Child Digital Health Record (0 to 4 years)
  • Child Digital Health Record (5 to 15 years)
  • Digital Pregnancy Health Record
Two GP clinics in Blacktown and Dubbo will be trialling the concept in the middle of 2020. During the trial, participants will visit the GPs who will undertake a child health assessment. The information will be uploaded via the GP’s practice management software and will flow into a centralised data hub. Once in the centralised data hub, participants can view the information via a mobile application.
The Agency is developing a business case to assess the proof of concept and determine options for national scaling. Discover more here.
Here is the link:
Let me say at once I get that we are working on digital records for children although I do wonder how all the data might go into a #myHR when the nipper grows up, or is the plan to just archive it.
Terms of use would also be interesting to consider. Is this an opt-in or opt-out system? Is it a Federal or State initiative and for how long is funding secured. Or is the Business Case etc. still to come?
It all seems to be moving at a snail’s pace since we had the initial announcements in April 2017. Three years later it is planned to trial in 2 GP clinics in a few months – hardly rapid progress!
I note that development is underway.

NSW starts trial of Child Digital Health Record

Friday, August 23, 2019 - 12:25
Entering a baby’s health records into a little blue book (in Queensland a little red book) has been a rite of motherhood for many years, but could be consigned to history with the launch of trials of a new Child Digital Health Record (CDHR) in NSW.
Depending on their location in Australia, a child’s health and development information is captured in different paper records.
As a result, a child’s parents must carry this vital information around in books as they go between healthcare appointments and visit multiple providers.
The CDHR initiative is looking to co-design, develop and pilot a digital version of the state hard copy ‘baby books. $A5 million was allocated to the development of a Digital Baby Book in the 2018 Federal Budget.
See here:
Lots of details are also here:
While the nipper stuff is slow and lacking some obviously important detail the SRA has me stumped. What is it and what is it for? It is not clear to me.
Please someone provide, via comment, a summary I, and others, can follow if you know what this SRA really is! While at it you could possibly also explain what being in an ‘evolution phase’ is!
David.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

HealthDirect (Subscriber) – SRA/NHSD solution details being finalised

Basically an idea proposed by the North Coast PHN in NSW. The Service Registration Assistant is pretty much a straight 'lift' from the UK DHSS.

Also referred to here on ADHAs website:
https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/about-the-agency/digital-health-space/better-outcomes-and-streamlined-administration-thanks-to-the-service-registration-assistant

20 December 2019: The new Service Registration Assistant – now entering the evaluation phase – can be used to reduce paperwork, keep healthcare practice details accurate and improve patient outcomes and experiences.

Setting up a healthcare practice is a bit like moving into a new house and needing to set up a variety of services, like gas, electricity, internet and water to live comfortably. When a healthcare practice starts up, they have to connect with a range of external services to do their job, for example, Medicare, a secure messaging provider and their insurance provider, just to name a few. Each time the organisation has a change, for example, when a new health practitioner joins, they must update those same services. A typical practice could complete up to 20 different forms to update a variety of external services, each time using the same information.

This is where the Service Registration Assistant (SRA) can help.

Reducing the burden of maintaining accurate data

The SRA collects core data that is needed for almost every transaction with an external service, such as the organisation’s name, ABN, healthcare identifiers, healthcare services, and the practitioners that work in the organisation. This data is validated against authoritative databases to ensure the data is accurate, before it is published to nominated external organisations.

The tool offers immediate benefits for healthcare organisations by reducing the burden of needing to complete the same details across many different forms.

Improving patient outcomes through better data quality

SRA saves time and resources for organisations, but it can also contribute to better patient outcomes and experiences by improving the quality of data available to practitioners when addressing and sending electronic communications. For instance, discharge summaries from hospitals often don’t make it back to general practitioners because of missing or inaccurate addressing information that is necessary for communicating between organisations. This means discharge summaries are being written but they aren’t making it to their destination.

Use of the SRA should reduce this problem, among others. The evaluation phase will enable the Agency to confirm the effectiveness of the tool in improving data quality to close the gap on the number of discharge summaries that are written but never make it back to a patient’s GP.

Evaluation phase commencing soon

The Agency is collaborating with the North Coast Primary Health Network (NC PHN) and the Northern NSW Local Health District, which is currently in the recruitment phase for the evaluation and will be starting before the end of the year.

If you choose to participate in the SRA evaluation, your practice and practitioner information will flow securely to external services to which you choose to disclose, such as:

Northern NSW Local Health District – will ensure that discharge summaries reach the right person at the right place
Secure message providers
Pathology services providers
The National Health Services Directory (NHSD) – will ensure that your organisation details listed are kept current.

If you would like more information or are interested in joining the evaluation, please contact the NC PHN’s digital health team at digitalhealth@ncphn.org.au.1

Please note that only organisations in the northern NSW region are eligible, and participation is capped at 100 organisations. ↩

Dr Ian Colclough said...

Hello, ...... I find this both illuminating and incredible to say the least. Surely to goodness I am misinterpreting the ADHAs claim which says:

"The evaluation phase will enable the Agency to ........ improv(ing) data quality to close the gap on the number of discharge summaries that are written but never make it back to a patient’s GP."

The pilot will be conducted in 100 organisations (presumably hospitals and medical practices).

Can this truly be what they meant to say?

So, Minister, after spending $2 billion to develop the My Health Record system we now discover that Hospital Discharge Summaries which are written and sent have been getting lost somewhere out there in the ether and never making it to their intended destination!! Surely not.

Anonymous said...

March 11, 2020 3:28 PM Thanks for that. I am guessing existing ‘autocomplete’ methods and apps don’t meet this need? I do hope their tools are safe and secure storing all that useful information.

On a side note, is it just me or is ADHA now just part of NSW health?

Anonymous said...

Technology for technology's sake.

Anonymous said...

The merits of SRA to one side, why is the ADHA developing small business administration applications? This is not a digital health tool built on national or international standards. Surely this is something the DTA should be doing with Michaelia Cash as sponsor. I guess the saving grace is nothing will be delivered of use and it will fade away. It is like Ehealth is being run by a service desk manager.

Anonymous said...

Why should the government be developing ANY small business administration applications?

Looks as though the ADHA is trying to justify its existence. MyHR is bad enough in normal times - inaccurate, out of data, incomplete, very few records with anything in them - in an epidemic it is a distraction and is worse than useless.

Anonymous said...

@9:45 AM No, no, no. The My Health Record has been designed to suck up every Coronavirus that comes it's way. Very farsighted of the ADHA so that when the My Health Record and ADHA disappear they will take Coronavirus with them.