IBM wins $24 million e-health gig

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 01 March 2011 10:21

Business IT - Networking

Computing giant IBM has been confirmed as the winner of a $23.6 million contract to design and build the security system which will allow Australian health professionals to securely access and exchange electronic health information and provide an audit trail detailing who accessed what and when.

The contract was awarded by the National E-Health Transition Authority (Nehta), the body which is managing the roll out of the Federal Government's e-health initiatives.

The National Authentication Service for Health (NASH) which IBM is charged with delivering will provide the authentication framework, using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and secure tokens - probably in the form of smartcards - which will ensure that only legitimate individuals can access information stored in Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHRs).

The timetable is tight given that Australians will be able to sign up to have their own PCEHR from July 2012.

The Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, acknowledged in a statement that; 'It is critically important that when our doctors and nurses use e-health systems they know that they are sending and receiving communications to and from the right people. This system will put in place strong access control mechanisms for PCEHR so that patients will be able to grant access to their information - and be able to track which providers have accessed their records.'

NASH is one of the cornerstones of the national e-health regime being planned by Nehta which has also been working on definitions for clinical terminology, messaging standards and unique health identifiers.

Nehta is also providing a software development kit that will allow existing and future healthcare systems and deployments to integrate with NASH. The challenge for some healthcare suppliers is that they will be rolling out their own systems before NASH is completed sometime next year and they will be heavily reliant on the efficacy of that software development kit or risk having a costly retrofit requirement when NASH is completed.