This press release appeared a few days ago!
Australian Digital Health Agency signs agreement with HL7 Australia to help connect Australia’s healthcare system
Published 24 August 2022
The Australian Digital Health Agency has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Health Level Seven Australia Ltd (HL7) to support the robust development and implementation of digital health standards and specifications to help improve connectivity across the national healthcare system.
Agency CEO Amanda Cattermole said the Agency’s partnership with HL7 affirms the importance of a thriving digital health standards ecosystem and would have a direct impact on consumers gaining better access to their health information through the Australian healthcare system.
“Digital health standards are critical to the safe, secure and seamless movement of consumer health information between different healthcare providers,” she said.
“Fostering and enabling interoperability in the health system is critically important and standards have a key role to play.
“The objective is to create a new era of digital health in Australia with strong governance. This means open, and collaborative processes for the agreement, development, testing, publishing and maintenance of digital health standards.”
Ms Cattermole said the organisations will collaborate to support consistent adoption of digital health standards to strengthen connected health care across Australia. National priorities will be addressed systematically and the standards community will be supported to grow in size and expertise.
“We want to foster a vibrant Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) community in Australia as outlined in Connecting Australian Health Care – National Healthcare Interoperability Plan. Put simply, FHIR is the how-to-guide that enables health information movement from one place to another, a freely available and nationally endorsed interoperability standard.
“The Agency and HL7 recognise that different parts of the health system are at different points in their digital journey. The long established V2 and CDA standards are widely used. These will continue to be supported during the transition to FHIR.
“Together with HL7 we will deliver training, education and uplift activities to support the health workforce to use the new standards.”
HL7 Australia Chair, Isobel Frean, said the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding represented a significant moment for the promotion and adoption of interoperability standards in Australia.
“This agreement is testament to the world class standards development community we have in Australia,” she said.
“Equally it presents an opportunity for our community to help nurture new partnerships across health and social care in the interests of achieving a consensus approach to the development of the standards we use in Australia.
“One of our priorities through the partnership is to more clearly communicate requirements for standards for national acceptance across public and private health and social care.”
Australia has an ambitious plan to connect health care by 2027. The Agency and HL7 are working together to ensure the digital health standards required to enable the movement of consumer health information through a connected healthcare system are robustly developed, easily adopted, widely available, well maintained and effectively governed.
Here is the link!
You need to read closely and have some historical perspective to realise just what BS this really is:
What on earth does it mean? “Australia has an ambitious plan to connect health care by 2027” Talk about chasing a mirage!
A little background here reminds us that Digital Health Standards Development is in a bit of a hole:
Look at this current page!
Standards Catalogue
IT-014 : Health Informatics
The list covers 2 Obsolescent and 5 Superseded Standards – all from 2005 or earlier.
Here is a link:
https://www.standards.org.au/standards-catalogue/sa-snz/health/it-014?status=superseded
Ob course all the activity was rather blown up by NEHTA and the ‘Tiger Teams’ around 2012 and basically never recovered!
For the present HL7 Chair to say “This agreement is testament to the world class standards development community we have in Australia,” is fantasy as most of the Australian expertise has not been supported of fostered within Australia for near on a decade. Yes we have some experts who know heaps but most have gone into their shell (or overseas) for a good while!
The ADHA has to fund, nurture and support a few oldies and a new generation of experts to get anything real going and it will not be quick! The world has moved on a good way with FHIR etc. and this expertise needs to be grown and supported for an extended period.
Basically the DOH / NEHTA / ADHA did not know what they had until they lost it – and a lot of the goodwill and trust that existed there. An apology might not be a bad idea!
The direction is dead right but the spin is just offensive.
David.
8 comments:
As a senior APS officer, Ms Cattermole has learned well how to use lots of big words to say nothing.
Ahh, the ambitous plan to connect health by 2027.
That's only 5 years away.
Goodness, I seem to recall that was NEHTA's plan in 2010. But the goal posts kept moving a few years at a time from 2010 to 2015 to 2020 to 2025 and now to 2027.
And the carousel keeps turning another full circle each time because nothing is ever achieved other than rewarding the ADHA bureaucrats and perpetuating their well paid ADHA jobs for another 5 years.
If they weren't in the ADHA jobs they would be enrolled in the NDIS for the disability pension.
Tony Abbot threatened to close the whole project down when he was Health Minister because they hadn't delivered. But he failed to do so and money pipeline just kept flowing, and flowing uncontrollably.
It's luck for the ADHA the health system is so flush with excess money.
I do not disagree, however the tenure of most at ADHA is relatively short and those that have remained seems so boxed in they look toward the retirement horizon or are happy to work their way through an APS career. I am still not convinced the ADHA know what they intend to do other than profit of those already in HL7, anyway it make no difference, systems are procured from large internationally vendors who adapt standards already for their own needs. How is a pimple on the butt of eHealth technologies going to make any difference other than as said - extract money for the limited tax pool.
Happy for HL7 Aus and hope they don’t blow an opportunity as it’s a pretty low value looking org at the moment thanks to years of egos and mismanagement
Standards are only useful if they support applications that deliver value.
MyHR is not one of those applications.
Jeremy Knibbs has written a very good summary and comparison of CovidSafe and MyHR
Scales of failure: CovidSafe vs My Health Record
https://medicalrepublic.com.au/?p=75713
IMHO the new Labor government has two options re MyHR.
Keep it or Kill it.
If they keep it they will be tarred with the same brush as the Libs. They will demonstrate that they are not competent to understand the obvious failure of yet another mega IT project and haven't the guts to recognise reality and pull the plug on it. They will also show that they are not really interested in effective and efficient management of the public purse.
If they kill it (and ADHA) in the next six months they will minimise any political fallout, even if the Libs try and talk up the system, nobody will care or believe them.
It might be a painful experience in the context of careers and jobs but it will be a drop in the ocean. The public service is big enough to absorb the folks at ADHA and Accenture has had it good for long enough. They live in a competitive marketplace and sometimes they lose - big deal. There is no way they will strenuously object - they will have the bigger picture in mind - future contracts. No government likes a bad looser who make a stink.
The bits and pieces that ADHA do manage that have value can be shunted to either Services Australia or the DHCRC.
None of this will fix the real problem in the public service - a lack of technical competence.
The MyHR had promise but it was hijacked by project managers and bureaucrats who only understand money and schedules.
It was easy to hijack because the promise came from outside the public service - consultants. All the project managers and bureaucrats had to do was stop paying the consultants and then take over the project. Then they moved on leaving a vacuum which has never been filled. Lawyers make even worse project managers and bureaucrats.
We should know by Christmas if the new government has the guts and competence to take a once in a decade opportunity. After that it will be business as usual.
Standards are only useful if they support applications that deliver value.
After so long without - who is the customer for Australian specific standards? And why is ADHA holding up FHIR as their version of the archangel Urial?
I believe there is a need for standards community in Australia, I am weary the ADHA will use it as a means to push their Solutions and specifications rather than agreed standards. They are after all no more independent than other EHR providers.
This is a positive step. A test of HL7 Australia’s ability not to be governed by ADHA will be if ADHA staff or special advisors/associates are put in key positions in HL7 Aus.
Legitimising the attendance of ADHA staff on working groups is welcomed after years of being in the shadows.
This seems like a cynical way for the ADHA to justify continued $300 million p/a funding what with a new government and an audit looming. Cattermole can say to the health minister that the agency will achieve interoperability in the healthcare system – the holy grail! Hopefully Butler won't fall for it.
If you think the text based spin is hollow - try attending one their briefings/ workshops. I am not sure where they found these people. The fixation on an implemented system is not standards development - it is system design and engineering. I came away feeling someone had ticked a box with no care of what the box was.
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