A Press Release That Conceals A Rather Large Problem. The Dominant GP System Provider Is Apparently Not Engaged With The PCEHR!

The following release appeared late last year.

iSOFT Demonstrates Progress at the NEHTA GP Desktop Vendor Panel

Monday, December 19, 2011 - iSOFT a CSC Company

Presenting at the NEHTA GP Desktop Vendor Panel on 6 December 2011, iSOFT demonstrated progress in preparing the practiX software to communicate health information according to the new NEHTA eHealth specifications.

Sydney, NSW – Earlier this month, iSOFT, a CSC company, presented at the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) GP Desktop Vendors Panel in Sydney. The purpose of the meeting was to review the progress of the six vendors participating in the project to prepare GP practice management software to communicate with hospital and specialist systems as part of the Federal Government’s PCEHR project. The first milestones in the project are to enable the applications to look up Individual Health Identifiers (IHI), accept discharge information and specialist letters – foundational elements of the Australian Government’s eHealth agenda.

Presenting along with iSOFT at the NEHTA panel were GP desktop vendors; Best Practice, Communicare, Genie, Medtech and Zedmed. Vendors demonstrated or explained the work they had been doing to enable their GP desktop systems to communicate health information according to the NEHTA specifications.

Each vendor showed evidence of progress against NEHTA’s milestones in preparation for implementation at the first GP sites early in 2012.

“As our eHealth solutions span primary, community, aged and tertiary care, we felt it was important to take an open and health system wide approach to meeting the NEHTA specifications. Using our iSOFT HIE Suite we are building interoperable components, that can work across iSOFT solutions and that are available to any application following the same NEHTA specifications,” explained James Rice, iSOFT APAC Managing Director.

“This open approach is of great advantage to state governments looking to implement Individual Healthcare Identifiers (IHI) across a health care system. Using iSOFT’s open Health Information Exchange (HIE) architecture, state departments of health will be able to identify and manage patients across multiple eHealth systems.”

Talking about the wider effort at iSOFT to achieve connectivity between applications, iSOFT’s Rice said, “Most recently we have used our HIE Suite to also enable our widely implemented Patient Management System (i.PM) for the HI without the need for customers to upgrade the core product. This is another example of the agility such a solution provides iSOFT and our customers.”

All vendors have now met the Wave I Release 1 requirements for use of healthcare identifiers. In addition to identifiers, iSOFT has achieved CCA conformance testing for the Secure Message Delivery (SMD) functionality. The SMD capability is part of the Release 2 functionality due 31 January, 2012.

iSOFT demonstrated the practiX GP desktop software interacting with the Medicare Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) database to retrieve a new 16-digit IHI number and associate it with a specific patient record. This functionality is the basis for the national eHealth reforms as it enables the secure sharing of health data across health care sectors.

The full release is here:

http://www.newsmaker.com.au/news/13720

What is interesting in this release is this list.

Here are the vendors who were involved.

·         Best Practice (BP)

·         Communicare

·         Genie

·         Medtech

·         Zedmed

·         and iSoft themselves.

The reason this is important is what is missing - Medical Director is not there!

In terms of market share I believe BP is now up to a little over 20% of the market and that the others are a good deal lower - please correct me if I am wrong.

Figures from a year or so back - and they are pretty hard to come by for obvious commercial reasons suggest - roughly the following:

MD (Version 2 and 3) - 35-45%

Pracsoft - Around 20-30% (MD Financials etc)

Best Practice - Around 20%

Medtech - Around 5%

Genie - Around 7-15%

ZedMed - Around 5%

Practix - Around 10%

Let me know if any of these figures are off!
The bottom line is that MD is at least 40% and probably closer to 50% so to not have them involved is just commercial stupidity on the part of NEHTA and DoHA.

I wonder just what is going on behind the scenes here?

David.