Feds scout for eHealth software partners

James Riley
Friday, 19 November 2010 15:06

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The National eHealth Transition Authority has issued its first calls for proposals from medical software providers wanting to build the Federal Government's new electronic health record standards into their products.

NEHTA said the request for proposals would set up a panel of general practice clinical desktop software makers, who would work with the authority and recently named early project sites to test and fine tune early specifications for Government's Personally-Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR.)

Government has set an ambitious target of completing the first phase of the PCEHR program the will let Australians register for an individual health record summary by the middle of 2012. With an initial budget of $466 million, the project was oneof the big ticket ICT initiatives announced in the May budget.

The Department of Health and Ageing last month announced the first wave of eHealth sites to be used to test and deploy various eHealth components that make up the national electronic records infrastructure.

Funding was provided in NSW to the Hunter Urban Division of General Practice, in Queensland to GP Partners, and the Melbourne East General Practice Network. Each will now engage with NEHTA and other community partners to implement PCEHR components that support sharing or aggregation of electronic health information.

The general practice clinical vendor panel is being established to deliver effective, reliable and financially viable software to the healthcare providers, with successful participants working collaboratively with NEHTA to support the lead sites and assist development of the national standards.

The eHealth sites aim to improve continuity of care for patients by establishing an electronic exchange of priority clinical information between care providers, especially discharge summaries, specialist letters, referrals, health summaries and medications management. The system will include the electronic transfer of prescriptions.

It is expected a completed set of technical specifications will be made available to vendors between December 2010 and March 2011. The panelists will be instrumental in contributing to the design of these. From March 2011 vendors will be required to embed the specifications into their products.