The following has just been published.
NSW first for health identifiers
- Karen Dearne
- From: Australian IT
- March 10, 2010
NSW public hospital patients will be guinea pigs for the countrywide rollout of healthcare identifiers, with an estimated 4.5 million people signed onto the new system by the state within 18 months.
National E-Health Transition Authority chief executive Peter Fleming told a Senate inquiry into the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Bill that - once the legislation and as yet undisclosed regulatory controls are passed by Parliament - up to 6 million Australians could have Medicare-assigned unique patient numbers, intended to support clinician access to personal health information, within that timeframe.
NSW Health is spearheading NEHTA's work on linking some 20 separate hospital-issued health identifiers to the new unique personal identifiers, off the back of an upgrade of current radiology information and picture archiving and communications systems.
Existing medical imaging and radiology systems are considered to hold the cleanest data.
The department is presently seeking a supplier for a statewide central storage and retrieval facility to support these systems, together with a new patient registry and matching system, an enterprise service bus to solve interoperability issues, and a capacity to integrate messaging with patient administration systems.
Under the HI Bill, all Australians using private or public health services will be assigned an identifier by Medicare over time, but the speed of uptake by private practitioners and hospitals will depend on their IT systems having the capability to "populate" internal records with the national number.
Much more here:
This is an evolving story. I will be reading the transcripts and seeing where this all goes over the next week till be hear the outcomes of the Senate Enquiry.
Enjoy.
David.
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