AusHealthIT's First Guest Blogger Article!

After a recent article reflecting on the recent NEHTA release of an outline of the technical specifications for secure messaging I was approached by Mr Tom Bowden, the CEO of HealthLink – asking if he could provide a comment in the form of his view as to a sensible 'roadmap' for secure health messaging in Australia.

I thought this was a very good use of the blog and so readily agreed. The article I have been forwarded is reproduced below.

Before handing over to Tom can I also say that Dr Ian Colclough has also been hard at work and has written a comprehensive comment to the earlier post (8 January, 2007) on “Why Implementation Matters”. I commend this also for your careful review. Just click on the comments tag at the bottom of the article.

With that said – over to Tom Bowden.

David.

A Connected Health Sector
– However Can We Get There From Here? –

Imagine a health sector in which nearly all of a General Practice's clinical and administrative communications are electronic. Doctors provide better patient care and they spend nearly an hour less per day on administration. Cutting through the paper-war makes the profession much more financially rewarding and enjoyable. With a universal communications framework available, the government can readily develop and implement national vaccination and screening systems, prepare for pandemics and possible bio-terrorism and speed up implementation of much-needed sector reforms.

Unfortunately if you are a GP in Australia, imagining the above scenario will be close as you get to achieving it in the near future. Australia's track-record in health sector automation (e-health) is among the worst in the developed world. Using another approach, Holland, New Zealand, and some of the Scandinavian countries have almost entirely connected their primary-care sectors. While they haven't solved every problem known to mankind, their family doctors' routine clinical and administrative communication is now all electronic. For example, in New Zealand a doctor is more than three times as likely to use an electronic service to perform a routine task as his or her Australian counterpart


Why is Australia's health system so substantially lacking in this important respect?

The answer is perhaps not one that you would expect; nevertheless, it is quite a simple one. In countries with well developed communications systems, automation of pathology services has been the initial platform upon which a wide range of electronic services has been built. Because of the large volume of information flowing between general practices and laboratories, automation of pathology messaging provides the best opportunity to initiate electronic communications. Beginning with pathology result delivery, a number of countries, including Holland, Denmark, New Zealand and to a lesser extent Canada have been able to build extremely useful standards-based e-health frameworks. These countries have used the opportunity to learn about and implement standards-based communications systems and to build the capacity of the practice and patient management systems that they link. In Australia however, the major pathology companies developed their own individual non standards-based systems for delivering pathology results.

Unfortunately the emergence of the Pathology Information Transfer (PIT) result delivery format as a de-facto standard has severely hampered adoption of internationally supported messaging standards within the Australian health sector. While Australia has a small number of half-hearted implementations of Health Level Seven (HL7), there has been nothing like the uptake of secure messaging seen in other countries. For instance, we now have a range of incompatible HL7 pathology report delivery implementations; approximately one for each major laboratory group.

By far the majority of results are still delivered using the PIT format. As well as being a proprietary, non standards-based message format, a PIT message is unable to be usefully incorporated within an electronic medical record (EMR). A PIT message can only be displayed in its entirety and stored as an object. By contrast, separate data elements of each HL7 message can potentially be incorporated into the EMR of the recipient, which permits the monitoring and display of trends, alerts the clinician to developing problems and significantly enriches the patient's medical record.

Without a reasonable base-level of standardisation in use in the Australian health sector, there is little opportunity to add further standards-based types of communication. The lack of activity has meant that there is a shortage of expertise in communications standards use and thus great difficulty implementing standards compliant services. Furthermore, Practice Management System applications vendors have gained little or no understanding of how to implement communications related capabilities within their application software and thus build better, more useful systems and richer EMRs that are capable of utilising the incoming clinical data.

The really sad thing is that Australia has already spent huge amounts of effort and money developing many of the standards, support services, systems and capabilities needed to do the job. The basic tools to enable there to be a connected health sector do exist; they are just not being used properly.

Unfortunately, instead of drawing upon and utilising pre-existing effort, the National e-Health Transition Agency (NEHTA) is using very little of the immense amount of work that was already underway prior to its formation. NEHTA's wish to start with a clean slate is in some ways understandable given some of the structural difficulties that met them. However, based upon the present rate of progress, it is likely to be some years before we see any implementable results.


Strategic Options

Clearly there has to be a better way of achieving useful results, so let us look at the broad strategic options. Around the world the health sector connectivity issue is being tackled using three contrasting approaches;

1. Implement a nationally funded state-run infrastructure, as is happening in the United Kingdom. This is typically expensive, slow and controversial as a nationally implemented 'one size fits all' communications system is imposed upon the sector.

2. Take a hands off approach, fund development of a few standards and hope that the sector will work together to make things happen. This has been the approach used in the Australian health sector for the past twelve years, since the commencement of electronic communications here. Judging by the results, it has clearly failed and should be discontinued. This approach provides too much opportunity for interested parties to drive the agenda to meet their own individual profit objectives, rather than strive for the good of the sector as a whole.

3. Work in partnership with specialised system integrators and service providers to implement international standards and champion the cause of connectivity. This is the approach that has worked very successfully in Scandinavia and New Zealand where small, specialised service organisations are given government backing and modest financial incentives to ensure that automation actually occurs.

Option Three is the approach most likely to succeed. Highly effective sector integration of the kind enjoyed by other countries will occur when a clear course of action is agreed upon and the task given to organisations whose success is based upon achievement of successful integration outcomes.

Action Is Urgently Needed

To get results I believe NEHTA needs to:

1. Recognise and involve sector participants.

Foster the establishment of an integration community. Encourage the participation of sector players in whose interest it is to make the transition from paper-based to electronic processes, such as Divisions of General Practice, specialised system integrators, practice management system vendors, and industry associations. All of these parties need to work together - not be kept at arms length - to get results.

2. Implement what we already have, properly.

Properly implement existing core HL7 messaging standards (AS 4700.2 and AS4700.6). These are the core messaging standards required to automate 40-60% of all general practice messaging. These internationally recognised, proven standards presently exist in Australia, but they are not properly implemented. The current quality of integration poses significant risks to patients. Industry bodies should be encouraged to demand fully certified implementation.

3. Define ONE standard for each purpose and rigorously enforce it.

Ensure rigorous policing of standardisation to prevent proliferation of different non-standard formats. The Australian Healthcare Messaging Laboratory (AHML) exists to certify all messages. All software organisations and industry players should be required to obtain AHML certification. Immediately, AHML should lead the process of making all laboratories use a common implementation of HL7 (AS 4700.2).

4. (Re)Engage and fully support a single national authentication framework.

Agree upon and implement an easy to use, dependable national authentication framework. This is critical for success. The Australian Health e-Signature Authority (HESA) was set up specifically for this purpose; NEHTA has however not embraced what HESA has done. HESA has since been merged with Medicare Australia. Further work needs to be done with HESA to ensure that the HESA certificates etc are easier to implement and support. (Much has already been done to improve the usability of HESA certificates but this work has since been mothballed.)

5. Tie payment to certified use of standards.

Tie funding policy to the communications strategy. It is important that the payment incentives to all health sector players, especially GPs, hospitals and laboratories, are tied to certified use of communications and security standards. International experience shows that tying payment of incentives to outcomes is an extremely successful way of implementing new communication systems.

6. Focus on achieving simple and measurable steps in the context of a practical, consultative National e-Health Plan.

Ensure that we succeed in walking before we try to run. Beginning with simple readily implementable formats and standards that will deliver day-to-day benefits is key to building momentum. In the health IT integration business success breeds success.

7. Set ambitious but achievable targets and ensure they are met.

Tackle the project in a down-to-earth, business-like manner. Set aggressive adoption targets. Reward participants for hitting milestones with incentive payments, tax-breaks or whatever else will motivate them. Provide disincentives to parties that are dragging the chain.

Conclusion

It's all about setting firm, clear targets and providing the leadership - and incentives - to ensure that targets are met.

At present a number of key influencers have a clear incentive to maintain control of proprietary communications frameworks and thus protect their referral streams and income.

To get real results, this must be turned around. Those parties who can and will help the sector make the transition from paper-based to electronic communications should be supported and where appropriate provided with incentives to do so.

Those who stand in the way of true sector integration need to be reined in and either provided with incentives to change, or prevented from continuing to obstruct progress.

Swift, decisive action in line with the above recommended steps could see Australian GPs, the wider health sector and ultimately the Australian public enjoying the benefits of proper health sector automation within 3 to 6 months.

Let's do what we can to make that happen.

Statement re Potential Conflict of Interest

Tom Bowden is CEO of HealthLink Ltd, an integration services provider operating in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

How Many Times Does This Sort of Thing Need to Happen?

If ever there was going to be an independent report that would focus NEHTA’s mind on the need to change direction this is it!

Last week the following article (selected quotes below) appeared in the Toronto Star. The full article can be found at the following URL:

http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/168761

Report slams e-health agency

“Smart Systems is not offering good value to taxpayers, consultancy says”
.....

The agency responsible for Ontario's electronic health infrastructure is poorly regarded in the health-care community, lacks strategic direction, and has not been held properly accountable by Queen's Park, according to an operational review conducted by Deloitte Consulting.

"Given the increased urgency for substantive progress with e-health in Ontario, an aggressive agency-turnaround plan is required," concludes the 100-page report, the outcome of an internal review launched a year ago by Health Minister George Smitherman.”
…..

“The agency, which employs more than 300 people, was created in 2002 and has since received $458 million from Ontario taxpayers as part of its mandate to electronically link and support the province's 150,000 health-care providers.”

…..

“Among the review's findings:

• There has been "little or no meaningful progress" with the creation of an emergency health record for Ontarians, though it was recognized there was "ambiguity" with the agency's role in this area.
• The network designed to link health-care providers is "below standard" when it comes to practices for monitoring performance and security.
• Assessing the agency's performance versus the government's expectations is difficult because "well-defined expectations, deliverables and measurable performance targets have not been established and documented by the ministry for SSHA."
• The Smart Systems' secure email service has fallen well short of expectations, as only a third of the 60,000 accounts that have been installed are being used.
• Though the agency is expected to host sensitive health information, "privacy policies are incomplete and not widely understood" and "many of the procedures necessary to provide guidance and direction have not been developed or are in draft form." In certain instances, "processes are ad hoc, undefined or undocumented."
• Security of patient information was also questioned, as Deloitte said it wasn't clear who was responsible for defining and implementing security controls and technologies. "As a result, sensitive information may not be protected consistently throughout its lifecycle."

A copy of the full report can be downloaded from:

http://www.ssha.on.ca/operationalreview/index.asp

All in all it would be difficult to say the money has been well spent so far.

The Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA) was intended to be a provider of connectivity services and standards for the health sector in Ontario, Canada – the largest province in the country with a population of a little over 13 million.

The mandate which the Agency was given in 2002/3 covered the following:

“The mandate at the time highlighted six products to support the priority initiatives identified within the SSHA regulation:

−Managing the private network;

−Providing a secure messaging service and online directories;

−Security infrastructure;

−Physical facilities;

−Voluntary emergency health record;

−Data and technology standards.”

A little later (2004/5) a role in application delivery for the sector was added. All the while the SSHA has been “pursuing a long-term goal of creating a voluntary EHR to allow health care professionals to access patients’ lifetime health histories. To achieve this goal, EHRs will need to connect many sources of information as well as currently independent applications and databases. Establishing electronic connections to allow information from different sources, applications and databases to be shared is the focus of SSHA’s efforts at this time.”

The parallels with NEHTA’s present role and activities are quite uncanny.

The five recommendations from Deloittes to the Ontario Health Ministry (among a large number of internally focussed recommendations) make it clear just what the key problems have been:

• “Finalize and approve the Ontario e-Health Strategy
• Strengthen e-Health program management
• Establish enabling legislation/regulation for SSHA
• Strengthen e-Health privacy policy
• Enhance communication and collaboration between MOHTLC and SSHA”

Essentially a secure messaging environment and a technical infrastructure has been created in the absence of an e-Health Strategy, implementation plan, privacy policy and effective communication with the key clients. Additionally the core role of the SSHA in servicing the health sector has been lost – along with over $A500 million it would seem.

Just how similar does all this seem to the way NEHTA is proceeding at present (developing infrastructure in a strategic vacuum and the like) and how different is the outcome likely to be unless a Deloitte like review is undertaken as a matter of some considerable urgency?

I do see light at the end of this tunnel and it is that of an oncoming train!

David.

Clinical Research Information Now More Freely Available on the Internet.

Good news for all those interested in the free exchange of medical research information in the last few days.

According to the Financial Times (FT) of the 10th of January, 2007

“UK PubMed Central yesterday went live offering 600,000 biomedical digital articles from leading academic journals, with financial support from the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and medical research charities.”

This new source of medical research information can be found at the following URL:

http://www.ukpmc.ac.uk

The FT says that it is operated by the British Library in conjunction with the University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute.
It will receive about $A10m in funding over five years from about 10 different sponsors.

What is most interesting is that, despite the complaints of the academic publishing interests, any medical research that is funded in whole or in part by the UK Government is to be made available, for free, on the internet within six months of its publication in final peer reviewed form.

Given that apparently 90% of medical research in the UK has an element of Government funding this is a major step forward for access to the clinical research literature.

The site is a twin of a site run by the US National Institutes of Health which can be found this URL:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

This site has similar content and also publishes research which is funded in whole or part by the US Government under similar rules. It has been operational for a few years and has proved invaluable.

The concept of making freely available medical literature funded from the public purse is an idea whose time has surely come. Researchers like their work to be easily accessible so it can be used and we all, as interested citizens, can see what our dollars are funding!

Let us hope Australia quickly follows suit.

David.

Implementation Really Matters!

In the article before this I wrote:

“A unifying flaw in all these documents is the lack of any reference implementations to confirm any of this is useful or valuable to even the minutest extent. Standards organisations have, I believe, a responsibility to prove what they propose works and can be successfully implemented before expecting it to be adopted. All this is a long way from passing that test.”

I feel this point is so important that it should be expanded upon.

Over the last decade or so we have seen the apparent emergence of a range of specifications in the Health IT area which have progressed through various standards processes and organisations but which have yet to achieve significant numbers of real-world implementations.

Major international examples include the original and later CEN/ISO EN13606, HL7 V3.0, openEHR, possibly SNOMED CT and I am sure there are others.

It is not clear just why these processes are so slow – but in part it must be related to issues of complexity, resourcing and other less obvious factors such as change management etc.

On the other side of the coin we have groups such as Integrating the Health Enterprise (IHE), the Object Management Group (OMG) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) whose processes emphasise that real world, fully scaled, implementation is vital to final acceptance of a standardisation proposal.

The practical implication of this stance is that theory does not get too far ahead of practice so that evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change is achieved. Also, of critical importance in the health sector, is the fact that the intangible issues (user resistance, impracticality etc) and unanticipated consequences are recognised early and managed.

An invaluable model that brings together and demonstrates all these approaches is the Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP).

Details can be found at http://hssp.wikispaces.com/

In essence this project is bringing together health and hard technical skills in a planned way to deliver a set of web services which will powerfully enable and facilitate projects such as US National Health Information Infrastructure and Australia’s HealthConnect should it ever get properly off the ground.

A hallmark of the work being undertaken is the approach of developing Draft Standard(s) for Trial Use (DSTU). Only once it has been shown that the standard works as expected and achieves it stated goals does it become a formal standard.

Those interested should visit the following URL for a comprehensive range of explanations and information.

http://hssp.wikispaces.com/HSSP.Navigator

It seems clear to me that the structured engineering approach being adopted here is much more likely to solve the issues around having effective standardised solutions than the non-implementation and non ‘proof of concept’ focused approach being presently adopted by NEHTA.

I wonder how aligned NEHTA’s yet to be released technical detail in areas like identity and terminology services is to the HSSP Project?

The Health Informatics Association of Australia (HISA) is also to be congratulated for working to extend the practical approaches used by IHE into Australia. This step will also help to move Health IT from the theoretical into the operational phase in Australia.

Can I suggest we are only ever going to see significant progress in E-Health space when the discipline of real world implementation and operation is applied to the worryingly large number of current Health IT Standards proposals and specifications which seem to be overly complex and out of practical control.

David.

Media Management, Real Progress or NEHTA Trying to Justify Their Existence?

Good heavens! There I was just calming down for a relaxed Christmas and suddenly a flood of new documents are released by NEHTA. And what a fascinating grab bag it is too!

Cynical soul that I am, I must say that the arrival of all this largesse on the second last business day before Christmas did make me wonder if the holiday period was being used as a cover to slip material out which might need to avoid scrutiny.

A more charitable interpretation is that NEHTA was concerned that I may have been bored over Christmas and wanted to keep me busy!

What was released? There were three documents.

The first document is entitled “Technical Architecture for Implementing Services Concepts and Patterns Version 1.0 – 21 December 2006 For Comment.”

The purpose of the document is said to be:

“This document describes the technical concepts and patterns for service implementation within the national E-Health Infrastructure. These technical concepts and patterns form the basis for a Technical Architecture of the national E-Health Infrastructure.

The national E-Health Infrastructure is the infrastructure that is being developed by the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) to support electronic health in Australia.”

The document is also intended to provide guidance as to how to develop systems which will make up the national E-Health Infrastructure.

Bluntly, this 27 page document is a joke. All it offers is a Services Orientated Architecture tutorial and a recommendation that information flowing between the various services be modelled as follows:

“Information can be modelled and represented in many different ways. This technical pattern recommends that information can be represented using the XML infoset and encoded using the syntax of XML. It also recommends the use of XML Schema to describe those XML documents.

This technical pattern ensures that the data works natively with Web services. Other forms of data can be used with Web services. However, they would have to be represented as binary data which is encoded inside an XML wrapper.”

It then concludes with a set of totally obvious and self evident architectural principles – as an Appendix – but offers no framework as to how these are to be implemented and no use cases so the implications can be understood.

This is another “get no one anywhere” effort from NEHTA.

The second document is entitled “NATIONAL PATHOLOGY TERMINOLOGY Draft National Reference Lists – Pathology Request and Results” and comes with two spreadsheets of the SNOMED CT codes, the fully specified term and the NEHTA preferred term and some linkages.

The most amazing thing about this release is that – while being at best half done -NEHTA is claiming it is a major step forward and at the same time saying this is not ready for use!

“NEHTA has delivered Release 1 of a national pathology terminology, comprised of draft National Pathology Request and Result Reference Lists for comment. It is important to note that these Reference Lists are not yet considered suitable for implementation.

These Lists are the first step towards the development of a national, standard pathology terminology, for use in all general practice, pathology and clinical information systems.”

Worse it just dismisses all the work done with AusPath by airily saying LOINC is not supported – despite being at the heart of ELINCS – the pathology messaging approach now being adopted and supported by HL7 in the USA! What is it NEHTA knows that HL7 does not I wonder? Some detailed report of the analysis that led to a decision of this importance is surely warranted?

There is also some evidence of haste in the completeness of content and spelling in some areas.

All in all this could have waited for release until it had been properly quality controlled, spelling normalised and Australianised and tested in a trial implementation or two prior to public release. Given the resources available to work on this area I would expect more refined and developed products.

The third document is entitled National Discharge Summary Data Content Specifications Version 1.0 – 21/12/2006. Staggeringly this document has been under-development for well over three years – first as part of the HealthConnect program and now (since 2004) as a NEHTA initiative. The time taken, for what should have been a relatively straightforward task, is a true reflection of the lack of focus and direction that exists in the E-Health sector under NEHTA’s leadership.

NEHTA described the document thus:

“This document describes a specification for standardising the content of a discharge summary. The specification is a template that divides the discharge summary into sections based upon topic-specific data groups such as medications, problems/ diagnoses, diagnostic investigations, etc. The template is part of the care record summary suite of specifications that NEHTA is developing for the Australian health informatics community. One of NEHTA’s goals is to standardise the suite of priority care record summaries and their data content to achieve semantic interoperability amongst healthcare provider systems.”

The document runs to 374 pages (or so) and defines a Discharge Summary Template of genuinely biblical complexity. While the rest of the world works to simplify clinical communication of key information (as seen in the recent design changes to the UK shared record and in developments like the Care Record Summary (HL7) and the Continuity of Care Record (ASTM) in the USA) NEHTA has been investing time and effort in rampant, essentially unimplementable information modelling overkill.

Frankly I have no idea how anyone could persuade busy interns to promptly and correctly fill in forms of this planned complexity – no matter what the incentive. This will simply not be used in my view – defeating its noble purpose.

There is a critical need for the simplest of basic information communication between hospitals and practitioners – about the amount of information that can sensibly fit on an A4 page – not this over engineered monster.

The adage of “walk before you run” is ringing in my ears as I type.

Frankly I admire the dedication and work ethic of those who have put this together – despite its obvious lack of practicality. Pity about the out of touch leadership who sponsored such a brave, but ultimately what I believe will be a fruitless, exercise. Let’s get this excellent team to review where the US and the UK have headed for sound and practical reasons and quickly come up with a basic sharable specification that has some hope of being implemented. For heaven’s sake let’s master walking before we try and run!

It can be done! This is shown by New Zealand where they now have approx 2.5 million summaries going out to GPs annually, using an HL7 2.2 standard. I understand this is now being upgraded to V2.4 after six years of getting momentum and use with a very basic standard. Seems like the Kiwis have a jump on us in more than Rugby .

A unifying flaw in all these documents is the lack of any reference implementations to confirm any of this is useful or valuable to even the minutest extent. Standards organisations have, I believe, a responsibility to prove what they propose works and can be successfully implemented before expecting it to be adopted. All this is a long way from passing that test.

All in all this looks to me like the response to a command from on high to “get as much as possible out before Christmas to show the last two and a half years have not been wasted”. What do you think?

David.

Why is NEHTA Pretending the Access Card Does not Exist?

NEHTA has released a document entitled “Privacy Blueprint – Unique Healthcare Identifiers (UHI) - Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) and Healthcare Provider Identifier (HPI) - Version 1.0 – 18 December 2006 For Comment”

Since it is said to be “for comment” I suppose I should feel free to offer a few comments! My comments are as follows:

1. For reasons that defy understanding the UHI project in general and this document in particular seem to either ignore, or be totally unaware of, the work being done by the Department of Human Services with the Access Card and the individual number being allocated to each of us.

The Access Card is going to give us all a number, and now NEHTA wants to give us another one which is manifestly less robust and less trustworthy and which won’t have legislative protection against misuse.

One also has to wonder about NEHTA’s costings – given the Human Services Department thinks number allocation will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and NEHTA has only $50 million over a few years to undertake a similar task.

Worse, the Access Card has done extensive public consultation on the privacy issues around numbering citizens and NEHTA is either ignorant of or ignoring it. I wonder which it is?

2. Blueprint is a misnomer. The document is in no way a blueprint – it is a consultation paper from which, I imagine, NEHTA plans to ultimately produce an actionable blueprint. As it stands it identifies and attempts to scope a good range of the contentious issues surrounding health information policy and asks for views on how they should be handled.

3. NEHTA has developed this document apparently in the absence of any input from the peak bodies representing health informatics practitioners, the Australian College of Health Informatics, the Health Information Society of Australia, health system vendors and health information managers.

Clinical input in the workshops conducted to develop and refine this document late in the year also appears to have been token at best (1 GP, 1 nurse and 19 others as I count it).

4. The document (on the basis of no evidence I can find within the document) seems to work from the implicit assumption that giving the entire population another unique number is a good and desirable thing. Given the cost and effort involved in doing this, and the known privacy implications of unique identifiers, this issue should have been addressed and reviewed.

To produce a privacy document that does not explore alternatives to giving every citizen yet another number is really staggering arrogance, especially when the business case for the entire project has remained on NEHTA’s secret list.

5. I think it is clear that if NEHTA has no capability to legislatively protect their planned identifier against privacy abuse and scope creep they should either drop the whole project or go back to government and get the protections that are so definitely required.

6. NEHTA proposes to obtain the basic information from the Medicare Australia individual person database. Given the well known lack of quality of, and number of duplicates in, this database due to the fact that its subjects do not, by and large, even know of its existence and thus have not corrected it, errors in record linkage based on the IHI are likely to be dangerously common.

Additionally I am not sure most Australian Citizens have been asked whether they are happy to have their demographic details shared by Medicare with a non-government company – as NEHTA most certainly is. I was under the impression that Medicare Australia – as a data custodian – should not disclose such information without the individual’s explicit consent.

7. The document mentions that consideration is being given as to the need for either one or two factor authentication for the IHI. Again where is the mention of the Access Card as a possible factor and even more worrying where is the discussion of individual verification of identity so the authentication can operate? Given that it is the initial registration phase that is both expensive and time consuming – one really wonders how NEHTA can plan to do anything other than adopt the Access Card identifier.

8. NEHTA has not appreciated that the main problem with identifiers such as the IHI is not technical security but mis-use by authorised users of a system. In this case we will have tens of thousands of providers and their staff able to search the IHI. Given the lack of effective controls seen at the ATO and CentreLink what is the chance this source of demographic information won’t be similarly abused. The answer is zero!

9. NEHTA seems to have a rather patronising view that they are equipped to make balancing judgements about the extent to which ‘my’ privacy should be protected and that this level can be balanced against some concept of ‘public good’. I would suggest that they are not so empowered and that I am the sole arbiter of what is sensitive to me and what needs protection. Were I, for example, be living with HIV / AIDS, I would expect not only an iron-clad guarantee this fact would not be disclosed to any-one without my permission but I would also want the right to substantial compensation for any system breach. NEHTA’s prime role is to facilitate the introduction and use of E-Health technologies and not offering a highly sensitive and responsive privacy approach that the public are totally comfortable with will doom their efforts before they start. This present document does not suggest they “get” this fact.

People are only going to allow electronic health records to be implemented and used if they are totally confident where the information is going and who has access to it.

There is a great deal also wrong with the detail of the document as well as with the proposed timing of the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA). The PIA work needs to be undertaken and reviewed publicly long before the enabling system is designed. The PIA must also address all known technical, organisational and legal constraints.

This entire privacy proposal is deeply flawed in my view and has a high risk of destroying the possibility of progress with E-Health implementations due to the destruction of consumer confidence in the way their private information will be handled.

David.

NEHTA has Failed and Needs to be Fixed – How is this to be Done?

A little history first – sourced from Version 1.0 of the NEHTA Fact Sheet dated March, 2005.

“In April 2004, Health Ministers endorsed-in- principle the establishment of a national entity to drive these critical national health IM&ICT priorities.

Australian Health Ministers' Advisory Council (AHMAC) members felt that achieving progress in some IM&ICT priorities was so urgent that it could not wait for the entity's establishment. AHMAC recommended that a transition team be set up to progress these urgent priorities and simultaneously finalise the establishment of the new national health IM&ICT entity.

On 29 July 2004, Health Ministers reaffirmed the importance of IM&ICT to health sector reform, and endorsed the immediate establishment of the transition arrangements. This transition team is known as the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA).”

From this it is clear that NEHTA was intended to have two roles. First to get on with some high priority activities and second to establish an entity to carry forward in the long term the AHMAC E-Health Agenda – as defined, presumably, by the Boston Consulting Group Report entitled “National Health Information Management and Information & Communications Technology Strategy” of April 2004 developed for the now defunct Australian Health Information Council (AHIC) and the National Health Information Group (NHIG).

This report was “intended to be a key input into a national strategic plan for health-related information management and information and communications technology (IM&ICT) that will be presented to the Health Ministers later this year.” i.e. 2004. If it was ever developed this plan has never been made public.

In July 2005 NEHTA became NEHTA Ltd an independent Public Company Limited by Guarantee. Around the same period it became clear that a review of the HealthConnect program had transformed that program into a “change management strategy”.

It can be safely inferred that NEHTA Ltd is the permanent entity that was to be established by the decision of Health Ministers in April 2004. NEHTA has thus transmogrified from a transition team to a permanent entity with funding that is committed to 2008/09 and 60 plus staff.

After two and a half years how close are we to some real and useful outcomes? The answer to this is not close at all. Nowhere is there any real evidence of a substantive transition either being underway or in any form imminent.

Where are the gaps?

First, the overarching National E-Health Strategy has yet to be developed – despite being urgently needed for two plus years.

Second, all urgency (or even a sense of urgency) has evaporated. It was so urgent in mid 2004 to get underway promptly that some corners were certainly cut. Now, two and a half years later, we find the key NEHTA deliverables are now due in 2008 or 2009. No one will be knocked down in this rush.

Third, there has been deep industry alienation and increasing concern as it is realised that much of what is offered by NEHTA is presently not practically implementable or clearly enough defined, and probably won’t be for another year or two at best.

Fourth, the guidance that was to be forthcoming for the jurisdictions on the standards to be adopted in Hospital computing has simply not happened.

Fifth, there has been no perceptible impact on GP computing from NEHTA initiatives to date. Indeed many GP initiatives that have been funded from the moribund HealthConnect program have been utterly non-NEHTA standards compliant (e.g. the SA Ozdocsonline Project and the NT P2P project).

Sixth, while the use of secure messaging within the health sector has been making some headway due, in large part, to efforts from providers such as Promedicus, Healthlink, Argus and Medical Objects, NEHTA has yet to offer any useful contribution to the space and has taken 10 months to move its draft documents to final status. While much has been made of the use of web services, after 18 months no web services specifications have been published and NEHTA has disavowed all interest in the structure of the messages to be sent. In the words of one messaging service provider I have spoken with, this is “about as helpful as a barnacle on a battleship”.

Seventh, NEHTA has continued with an approach of developing and announcing positions and policies while providing only minimal, if any, sound justification for the conclusions drawn and only very infrequently providing references to the international sources on which much of their work is so obviously based. This is especially so in the interoperability and the international Health IT Standards arenas.

Eighth, there has emerged considerable confusion about just what Standards NEHTA is working on and what is within the purview of Standards Australia. This has led to the alienation of a number of people who previously have been working well with the IT-14 Committee structure. To many in the industry, NEHTA seems to have abandoned the standards process altogether.

Last, NEHTA has had an excessive emphasis on technical and managerial matters to the exclusion of a real focus on its core reason for existence – the health sector and its needs for IT enablement and infrastructure. In my view, NEHTA simply does not ‘get’ the health sector and its priorities.

It seems pointless to go on. NEHTA as presently constituted and managed is a clear failure lacking the health sector and political skills to deliver the needed outcomes.

It is vital that substantial change is made to get the National E-Health Agenda back on track and that the “baby is not thrown out with the bathwater” i.e. the useful work that has been commenced – in areas such as Clinical Terminology – is not impeded.

Among the most important changes that are needed are, in my view, (ideally by June 2007):

1. Return of NEHTA to the public sector with full transparency and accountability. This would include release of all documents that relate to NEHTA decision making to ensure there is appropriate public input and comment on planned directions.

2. Installation of a new and broadly representative Board – which provides both expert and industry savvy oversight of NEHTA’s operations. The jurisdictional representatives should be demoted to being advisory only. This Board would report to AHIC and Health Ministers. A vital early act would be the development and publication of a clear definition of NEHTA’s role, powers, accountability and concrete performance measures.

3. Full public disclosure of the membership, skill and interests of all those who are involved in NEHTA advisory committees etc.

4. Development of a NEHTA Policy Review Process that ensures all work reflects a practical understanding and recognition of the needs and priorities of the Australian Health Services delivery sector as well as technical imperatives.

5. Development of a National E-Health Strategy, Business Case and Implementation Plan which clearly identifies the optimal approach to the deployment of Health IT in Australia to improve safety, quality and efficiency, defines the activities and investment required, and makes clear the responsibility and accountability of all the relevant actors (Health Ministers, Jurisdictions, Commonwealth Government, NEHTA, Standards Australia, Private Sector Actors etc).

6. A renewed push to rekindle support for the core messaging and security standards and give the sector an immediate path forward. NEHTA should be encouraged to continue looking at the medium to long term future, but if it cannot contribute to moving forward rapidly in pragmatic and practical directions from the present state, it should stand aside.

Unless such ‘root and branch’ review is undertaken and implemented it is likely the 2000-2009 decade will be seen as a wasted decade that set the Australian Health Sector back many years.

Happy New Year to all!

David.

ps Blog Updated 02/01/2007 8.00 am to clarify point 6.

D.

Happy Christmas and A Successful New Year to All.

Just a short entry to wish all the readers of this blog compliments of the season and all the very best for 2007. I hope we can see some real progress next year!

I plan a week off to consider some of the more complex issues and also to review some papers for Medinfo 2007.

Early next year I plan articles covering

• Personal Health Records

• The Opportunity Costs of not Implementing E-Health

• Shared Electronic Health Records – How can They Be Made to Work?

• NEHTA's Pre Christmas Document Releases – Do they Add Anything Useful?

• The IHI And the Access Card – What Total Policy Overlap and Stupidity.

See you in 2007!

David.