The 2014 eHealth year in review: part three

After the flurry of debate following the release of the May budget, the Horvath review and the Royle review, attention in the third quarter of 2014 changed to the corporate sector. It was time for a couple of big players to make their moves, including Telstra Health, Hills and Orion Health, but as always, the PCEHR popped up as a constant bone of contention.

Pulse+IT has been following developments in designing a model to allow pathology and radiology results to be uploaded to the PCEHR for close to 18 months now, since former health minister Tanya Plibersek announced $8 million in funding at the HIC conference in Adelaide in July 2013.

While that announcement was greeted positively, there was a bit of an uproar when the Department of Health began to suggest that all diagnostic results be uploaded rather than the full pathologist’s report, with both Pathology Australia and the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (RCPA) both kicking up a stink about it. There was a also a distinct lack of agreement on what to do about diagnostic images.

There were some very heated debates last year, and then the PCEHR hiatus set in as the Royle review was awaited and there was no more progress until late June this year, when the department released two discussion papers on the proposed models.

It seemed by July that while it needed a lot of work, the authority to post (ATP) method had been agreed upon, but in August this seems to have been dumped in favour of a seven-day delay. This would raise many an eyebrow, with debate rumbling on for the rest of the year.

In the meantime, the presidency of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) was up for grabs, with all candidates mentioning eHealth as a priority. The eventual winner, Frank Jones, was full of praise for the use of IT in primary care, scathing about the lack of electronic communication from hospitals and specialists, and pragmatic in his approach to the PCEHR.

Things livened up with a good old-fashioned OMG-type situation over medical records left in a garden shed, but to the disappointment of many we discovered that the promised Deloitte “refresh” of the national eHealth strategy would remain secret even longer. Never fear, however: Deloitte was kept busy helping the Department of Health run consultation meetings on the Royle review and its recommendations.

Some major software deployments were announced in the third quarter, including a nationwide electronic donor record (EDR) based on the iTransplant medical information system, involving a real-time clinical data repository to streamline data sharing on organ donation and transplant processes; Justice Health in NSW went live with a new electronic medical record suite from Orion Health; CSC went live with a $56 million Defence eHealth Information System for the Australian Defence Force based on technology from the UK’s EMIS; and Bankstown Hospital went live with its Paper-Lite EMR, digitising a whole hospital in the process.

In the jurisdictions, Queensland released a comprehensive report from its parliamentary inquiry into telehealth, recommending that Queensland Health Minister Lawrence Springborg get on the blower to his federal counterpart and lobby for GPs to be able to bill Medicare for direct telehealth consultations with patients and that priority be given to implementing the NBN in remote communities.

The new heads of the newly formed eHealth NSW explained to a packed Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) NSW Healthcare special interest group function how the state planned to implement the Blueprint for eHealth in NSW, the eHealth plan for rural and remote NSW, and spend $400 million on ICT in the process.

Western Australia prepared for the opening of the flagship Fiona Stanley Hospital in early October, which went off without a hitch despite the widely publicised problems the hospital and the state government had experienced with its hugely complex, still unfinished IT system.

But it was in the corporate sphere where most of the news was made. Several major players made their presence felt, including technology solutions provider Datacom, which announced it was setting up a new healthcare solutions unit and taking a 20 per cent stake in Canberra-based health IT firm SmartWard.

At the Information Technology in Aged Care (ITAC) conference in Hobart, Hills of hoist fame announced its arrival on the healthcare scene. Hills had undergone an 18-month restructure that saw it divesting itself of heavy manufacturing – and later licensing its household products business to Woolworths – in order to concentrate fully on becoming a technology company.

One sector it is very keen on is health and aged care, leading to the establishment of a health solutions division that made some strategic purchases last year by acquiring Merlon, Hospital Television Rentals and Questek.

This year, it signed a distribution agreement for the Lively suite of home monitoring equipment, as well as an agreement with Irish company Lincor for its patient engagement technology suite.

Telstra Health also made a bit of a splash at ITAC, announcing it was planning to ditch the telehealth pilots and go for the jumbo jet, as well as explaining more fully its plans in community and residential aged care. Telstra’s purchase of aged care software market leader iCareHealth later in the year would become one of Pulse+IT’s most read stories for the period.

Other notable events at ITAC were the demonstration of a hands-free nursing system from HealthMetrics; Leecare’s announcement it would roll out its P5 Exec module as a standalone application; Feros Care’s announcement it would go gung-ho in supporting clients to use the PCEHR; and everyone agreed that while the new government had decided to fundamentally redesign the network, the NBN remained the gold standard for telehealth provision to older people at home.

Telstra Health then moved on to make a bigger splash at the Health Informatics Conference (HIC) in Melbourne in August. Not only did it show off new branding for some of the companies it has acquired, but it was the subject of much interest during the annual Q&A that has become a popular feature of the conference.

Most in the eHealth sector have been watching Telstra’s movements closely since it first outlined its plans in full last year, first to investors and then to Pulse+IT. It was in October, however, when Telstra Health made its plans known to the wider community, as it officially launched its new business and in the process got the AMA’s knickers in a knot. More on that tomorrow.

And then there was Orion Health. Long the subject of conjecture over the pond regarding its plans to go public, the darling of New Zealand’s health IT sector provided an intriguing overview of its plans to take on the giants of global health IT at a customer conference in Sydney. Orion Health has plans, and they are big.

It was a big couple of months for eHealth, but here are some of the other software, apps and developments that caught our eye in the third quarter:

Missed the first instalments? Here they are:

2014 eHealth year in review: part one

2014 eHealth year in review: part two

The eHealth year in review concludes:

2014 eHealth year in review: part four

Majority of prescriptions now dispensed electronically: eRx

Electronic prescription exchange service eRx Script Exchange has published a new report detailing progress in electronic prescriptions since its establishment in 2009, showing that 80 per cent of all prescriptions are now dispensed electronically rather than manually.

According to eRx, 87 per cent of pharmacies are now using its system along with 72 per cent of doctors. Part of the achievement is due to the interoperability of eRx with its rival MediSecure, meaning GPs can use one or both.

Paul Naismith, CEO of parent company Fred IT, said the fact that 80 per cent of all prescriptions in community pharmacy were now dispensed supported by eRx was extremely significant in passing on improved safety to patients.

“Patient safety is improved as a result of the fact that patient and medication information is provided electronically by the GP, rather than being re-typed by pharmacists,” Mr Naismith said.

“Electronic prescriptions provide the entire healthcare team with up-to-date, accurate information, which improves decision-making.”

The report identifies a number of key factors underlining the progress, including the provision of incentives for GPs and pharmacists to take up ePrescribing, ePrescribing being a centrepiece of the Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement (5CPA), support for electronic transfer of prescriptions by pharmacy and medical professionals, and collaboration between pharmacy and medical IT vendors.

“This is only the beginning,” Mr Naismith said. “Now that electronic prescriptions are part of professional practice, the health sectors will be able to continue innovating and improving outcomes for patients and professionals. The next, and perhaps most exciting chapter, will be working towards paperless prescription options.”

General manager for product development at Fred IT David Freemantle said eRx was able to track dispense records on a transactional basis. They show that of the 270 million or so prescriptions dispensed in Australia every year, eRx records a dispense record of over 220 million.

eRx launched its integrated Express app last year, and while growth has been slow, 10 per cent of Australian pharmacies are now dispensing via the app. Mr Freemantle said the company would continue to work on the app with a view to one day being able to return a complete medications record back to the patient’s smartphone.

“We’ve got the plumbing in place now, so we can make these things happen,” he said.

The 2014 National Progress Report can be downloaded at www.erx.com.au/national-report

MedicalDirector adds vaccine ordering app to widget store

Clinical and practice management software vendor MedicalDirector has added a vaccine ordering app to the Widget Store on its sidebar.

The widget allows practices to order vaccines, consumables and drug screening kits from pathology providers’ online stores from within the MedicalDirector Sidebar.

Widgets are available from QML (Queensland), Laverty (NSW/ACT), Dorevitch (Victoria), Abbott (SA) and Western Diagnostic (WA/NT).

The Widget Store, which also includes apps for Healthshare fact sheets, the Image Safe medical imaging sharing system and UHG’s insurance report, has been designed to allow doctors to access clinical apps from within the software without interrupting workflow.

Once the widget is installed on the Sidebar, users can sign in to the pathology online store using their MedWay account details and complete orders.

Opinion: Why wearable tech will change how health is delivered

When some people think of wearable technology, they often consider devices such as Bluetooth headsets. While this is certainly true, the modern expectation is that a wearable device for the medical industry will not just perform a function but will provide information that aids healthcare professionals based on sensor data.

It is in this area that healthcare will benefit in the coming years, in a market that will provide telehealth solutions to millions of patients worldwide. In fact, a January report from Californian research firm IHS forecasts that the global telehealth market will grow tenfold within five years, with telehealth driving global revenues to $US4.5 billion in 2018.

Clearly, the healthcare industry is facing some challenges with adoption but happily, Australians are always keen adopters of new technology and the same is true in the wearables market. A recent survey from Kronos indicates that 30 per cent of Australians use wearable devices in their personal lives, which is 50 per cent more than their US counterparts. In fact, 43 per cent already use them at work. This adoption rate practically ensures a smooth transition to wearables for health and fitness use.

In my opinion, it is healthcare providers who are best placed to encourage the use of wearable devices, both as a care solution and as a means of improving health in a fresh and new way. There are several reasons why patients would listen to their doctor’s recommendation ahead of commercial advertising or word-of-mouth.

Fitness bands were perhaps the first popular devices that provided useful information, but primarily for those engaged in cardio activities such as running. Depending on the type and model selected, they can record the number of steps taken, pulse and heart rates and more, transmitting the data to your smartphone using Bluetooth or using ANT+ for those with bicycle computers. Such data is useful when shown to doctors and can aid diagnostics although they are not specifically designed as medical devices but for monitoring general fitness.

However, the principle for many of these devices is the same: data is transferred to a portable device, whether smartphone or laptop, and can be analysed at a later time. In most cases, smartphones are the likely interface for those on the move, while home users often use Wi-Fi to transfer data locally and to the cloud for storage and reporting.

I would take a very calculated guess and say that there will be a time where the patient will upload the data and it will end up on the health professional’s screen. There are many possible variations so that is the reason why direction from knowledgeable healthcare professionals is required.

Concentrating on wearables – rather than other telehealth benefits such as remote access to clinics using video – devices already on the market that enhance patient care include:

There are many other devices available for specific ailments and purposes but all serve a common goal – to provide healthcare data and to monitor patients’ vitals in a way that saves time while still improving doctor-patient interaction.

For example, if you are treating a patient for high blood pressure and have prescribed medication that is having a desired effect; do you really need several clinic visits to follow it up? Normally, yes but with wearable computing, blood pressure is constantly monitored and can even aid in identifying situations that raise blood pressure. By analysing the data received, the time of an incident is read instantly and all without travelling to the clinic. The patient is happy and the clinic’s treatment room is free for another patient. A win-win situation?

Australian practices and clinics need to embrace this technology sooner rather than later, as the benefits outweigh possible costs and training. Whether it is convenient access to patient information, guided surgery (Google Glass can cater for both, for example), recovery and therapy tasks, careful selection of devices and apps can reduce clinic visits, patient costs and clinic hours per patient.

The adoption of wearable tech can also improve efficiency in a manner that ensures more clinic time is spent on seriously ill patients or in treating those that require immediate help.

There is a lot of work required to implement the right processes, workflows and guidelines for such aspect of care, but it’s there for all to see that mobile devices, centralised data analysis and health professional interventions are the way of the future.

Rob Khamas is an eHealth solutions strategist with REND Tech Associates.

Telstra buys aged care market leader iCareHealth

Telstra Health has added another software vendor to its growing healthcare portfolio, acquiring the aged care market-leading firm iCareHealth.

Telstra Health has bought the company outright, with the Australian arm to become part of Telstra and the UK arm to separate, iCareHealth’s managing director Chris Gray said.

iCareHealth bought UK community care specialist h.e.t Software in 2012, allowing it to offer a single person electronic health record that accommodates the entire continuum from community care to residential aged care.

Mr Gray said becoming part of Telstra Health would provide the company with unrivalled scale and stability as aged care moved to the new consumer-directed care (CDC) model.

“Telstra’s vision for a connected eHealth system for all Australians is the thing that really attracted us to becoming part of their vision,” Mr Gray said.

“With aged care it’s not a short stay like it is in hospital, so recording that information, whether you go into residential aged care or in your own home, I think that’s one of the critical things that needs to happen and will make greater efficiencies as we age as a nation.”

Telstra Health managing director Shane Solomon said Telstra’s aim was to create an integrated eHealth ecosystem and aged care was a crucial part of that.

“Strategically, we see a lot of connectivity issues in aged care and we think having a strong presence in residential aged care will help with those,” Mr Solomon said.

“For example, people going into aged care these days are very complex – in years gone by they would have been in hospital – so they often come out of hospital with their medications changed and there is a high degree of confusion about whether they should stay on those medications.

“We think that the foundation that iCareHealth gives will enable us to help with some of the pain points, with isolation and the disconnect between residential aged care and other parts of the system.”

iCareHealth’s management team and staff will all make the move over to Telstra but will be able to continue to work autonomously, Mr Solomon said. “We met up with Chris soon after we started Telstra Health and we were really impressed with the company. [It is] very professional, systematically going about understanding what the needs of their customers were.

“It very much fitted our profile of building our capability … but strategically, it’s about residential aged care. It’s a big part of the ecosystem and while Chris and the team will get on very autonomously, doing what they do best, we think we can add some new solutions that are not yet there in the marketplace.”

This is not just limited to the big move Telstra is making in telehealth through its new ReadyCare business, Mr Solomon said. Telstra will also bring other parts of its portfolio, including Fred IT in pharmacy and Verdi in hospitals, as well as its new investment in Orion Health, into the mix.

One of the key areas of focus will be on medications management, with Telstra hoping to develop solutions that link GPs, geriatricians, hospitals and community pharmacy to residential and community aged care.

“iCareHealth is dominant in the market in the area of medication management within residential aged care, so there is tremendous value if we can build on Fred IT and integrate with hospital information through Verdi and with Orion, to move towards an integrated medication record,” Mr Solomon said.

“That will make it much easier for residential aged care to be able to update medication when people come out of hospital, easier for GPs and geriatricians because they’ll at least be able to say comprehensively what medication they are on, and we think it can be done much more efficiently.

“It’s not just telehealth; it’s about the integrated record between residential aged care and hospitals.”

While he would not be drawn on the specifics, Mr Solomon said Telstra Health and Orion Health planned to work together on eHealth initiatives, particularly in medications management.

“The whole area of medication management, including hospitals, we are deeply interested in,” he said. “Even with eRx, there is only 0.1 per cent of eRx prescriptions within the PCEHR, so that value is still locked up and not available for anyone to look at. We think there is potential here.”

Mr Gray said aged care was a growth area in both the residential and community settings. Aged care providers are consolidating and getting bigger, as evidenced by moves by private providers like Jepara and Regis to list on the stock exchange, and not-for-profits such as Villa Maria and Catholic Homes merging services in Victoria.

“With aged care in the past you would have gone into a facility but because of the changing models of care and use of technology you are going to stay in your own home longer,” Mr Gray said.

“There is significant growth in community care because people are staying in their own home longer but with more complex healthcare issues than ever before, so technology plays a key role in helping to deliver safe, high-quality care to people in their own home.”

Mr Solomon said the acquisition will open the opportunity to provide an integrated community and residential aged care offering to those big organisations but also for smaller players that don’t have the resources to deal with contractual arrangements with multiple vendors.

“I think there is the potential to offer them a much more integrated clinical management system that crosses their whole business,” he said.

The iCareHealth purchase means Telstra Health now has a technology footprint in almost all sectors of the healthcare industry, barring an outright purchase of a general practice software package. Mr Solomon would not be drawn on his plans to acquire one of those vendors, but said there were obvious areas were Telstra could play a part.

“There are multiple options and one of those is buying space on the desktop,” he said. “It is pretty much established practice now that all of the GP software vendors will give you space and that is an option.

“But our interest is about connectivity and one of the issues for the GP desktop is that apart from eRx it is pretty much a self-contained thing.

“Our deeper interest is how we can, for instance, improve referral systems and that involves a cloud approach, it involves connecting multiple providers, and GPs are one of them.”

In addition to its purchases and investments in software vendors, Telstra Health also recently committed $2 million to a two-year collaboration with The George Institute for Global Health to bring technology solutions to pressing healthcare challenges.

The partnership will explore the effect of eHealth technologies and services in supporting healthcare delivery as well as identify and develop eHealth innovations to support new models of care.

These include shared electronic health records, electronic decision support systems, home telemonitoring, patient self-management tools and predictive analysis.

Data management platform to power collaborative data network

Melbourne-based data management systems specialist Arcitecta and supercomputing giant SGI are working together to build customised research platforms to give the research community access to the massive amounts of data held in the national Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) project.

Arcitecta’s Mediaflux data management platform has been chosen as a key data management engine for the RDSI project, which is providing storage for some of Australia’s huge data sets generated through genomics, DNA sequencing, population health research and cancer tissue banks.

The data sets are held in eight distributed data centres or nodes, which currently contain over 11 petabytes (11,000 terabytes) of content and are expected to grow to over 55 petabytes as part of the project. The idea is to allow researchers to access, analyse and re-use the data held in the nodes in a coherently governed environment.

Researchers will be able to peruse data collections by name, type, owner, date and linked publications as Mediaflux is able to make disparate types of data available to users through its metadata search engine. Data can also be quickly discovered and queried as it is ingested due to the automatic metadata extraction capabilities of Mediaflux.

Mediaflux is being used to build a web-based repository for the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Mental Health, where researchers will be able to capture, access and query clinical observation data from longitudinal studies of biomarkers.

It is also being used to power Victoria’s Clinical Audit Research electronic Health Record (CAReHR), which has been set up to share data between clinics caring for refugees and to provide real-time surveillance for emerging health issues.

In the RDSI project, it will facilitate rapid collaboration across different data types and data repositories that would otherwise be incompatible.

RDSI project director Nick Tate said the benefits from better-managed and more accessible research data are being sought everywhere across the research sector.

“At the same time, the acceleration in data creation is outstripping growth in data storage capabilities,” Dr Tate said. “A national data environment of the scale planned means new questions can be asked on topics, and at levels not previously thought possible.”

Arcitecta chief technology officer Jason Lohrey said the research community was on the cusp of achieving a national data management environment.

“This is creating a sustainable foundation for curating the collective output of Australian researchers and our international collaborators, leading to better research outcomes and a more efficient way to conduct large studies,” he said.

Web technologies provide portal to shared care

This story first appeared in the August 2014 issue of Pulse+IT Magazine.

At their simplest, shared care software packages can prove to be an easy way for general practices to create general practice management plans (GPMPs) and team care arrangements (TCAs), both of which attract a full Medicare rebate. But at their best, they can provide a platform to fully automate and streamline shared care for patients with complex and chronic illnesses, and to break through healthcare information silos.

While shared care software is not exactly new, getting busy GPs to actually use these systems has always been a struggle. The concept behind them – in which all of a particular patient’s care providers can view and add to an electronic shared care plan – is sound, but a combination of lack of time, lack of incentive and lack of IT capability with some healthcare providers has meant that their use is still not particularly widespread in Australia.

That is changing somewhat as Medicare Locals have begun to invest in these systems on behalf of local primary care providers, and it is possible that even with the government’s planned move to fewer and larger Primary Healthcare Networks (PHNs) the momentum will not end as evidence mounts that shared care plans can work for patients with common chronic diseases.

A study published in the Medical Journal of Australia last year, for example, showed that using a web-based platform for GPMPs and TCAs for patients with types 1 and 2 diabetes led to a boost in the number of plans that were regularly reviewed, which in turn led to an improvement in patient adherence to best practice self-management. It also showed clinical improvements in overall levels of measurements such a blood glucose and cholesterol levels.

That study involved the use of cdmNet from Precedence Health Care, probably the best known shared or collaborative care product on the market. cdmNet has been around for a number of years and its use is particularly strong in its home state of Victoria.

Others are emerging, however, including Ocean Informatics’ Multiprac CP, which has been installed by the Western Sydney Medicare Local (WentWest) and rebranded as the LinkedEHR, as well as New Zealand company HSAGlobal’s CCMS, which not only has a footprint in Australia for use in the Access to Allied Psychological Services (ATAPS) program and in district nursing, but is also the technology underlying New Zealand’s ambitious National Shared Care Plan program.

We take a look at what these three platforms offer.

To read the full story, click here for the August 2014 issue of Pulse+IT Magazine.

Telehealth community gears up for SFT-14

A draft program for November’s Successes and Failures in Telehealth (SFT-14) conference has been released, featuring keynote speakers Gordon Peterkin, former director of the Scottish Telehealth Centre, and Peter Soyer of the University of Queensland’s Dermatology Research Centre, who will discuss the future of teledermatology.

The draft program for the two-day event also features some of the best-known researchers and practitioners in Australian telehealth, including the Australian e-Health Research Centre’s Yogi Kanagasingam; the Centre for Online Health’s Dominique Bird, Anthony Smith and Len Gray; the University of Adelaide’s Tory Wade; and Flinders University’s Alan Taylor and Colin Carati.

One complete session will be dedicated to a workshop for the Centre for Research Excellence in Telehealth, which was officially launched in July to focus on translating research findings into clinical practice.

One topic of interest as changes are made to the roll-out of the National Broadband Network is a presentation by UQ’s Liam Caffery on the quality of video consultations performed using 4G mobile.

New Zealand will be represented by Stephen Jennison of the Northland District Health Board, who will discuss rural outpatient heart failure management.

A roundtable session will also be held on national telehealth strategies, with panellists including invited representatives from various state and territory health departments.

Organised by the Centre for Online Health in association with the Australasian Telehealth Society, SFT-14 will be held from November 17 to 18 at the Hilton in Adelaide.

Data linkages for rural and remote health research

How to maximise the use of national, regional and local health data sets for shaping and evaluating frontline rural and remote health services and policy is one of the focuses of the 4th Rural and Remote Health Scientific Symposium, being held in Canberra in September.

Day two of the symposium will feature speakers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Medicare and the National Health Performance Authority (NHPA).

Topics include data linkage and monitoring changes over time, handling some of the challenges with data analysis in rural and remote areas, getting access to reliable small area data and linking big and small data sets for geo-spatial mapping and analysis.

Day one will concentrate on how to improve collaboration between national data agencies and local health service providers, community groups and early-career researchers to undertake
systematic research and evaluation of frontline rural health services.

The keynote address will be delivered by David Hansen, CEO of the Australian e-Health Research Centre (AEHRC) and chair of the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA).

Dr Hansen will give examples of CSIRO research in rural and remote Australia and how the information gathered can be used to inform government policy and funding models. An important aspect of the work is to extract meaning from the wide range of home and health service data collected as part of service delivery.

He will discuss the telehealth trials CSIRO is involved in around the country, as well as the use of mobile phones, tablets and sensor networks to support the delivery of health services in the community, including cardiac rehabilitation, smart home technology to enable older Australians to live safely in their homes, and tele-medicine systems for remote eye screening.

The symposium is jointly organised by the National Rural Health Alliance (NRHA) – of which the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) is a member – the Australian Rural Health Education Network (ARHEN), the Primary Health Care Research & Information Service (PHCRIS) and the Australian National University.

It is being held at Old Parliament House in Canberra on September 2 and 3. Online registrations are open.

Deloitte and DoH to begin PCEHR review consultation

Consulting firm Deloitte will shortly begin organising face-to-face meetings with healthcare sector peak bodies to help the Department of Health gauge reaction to the Royle review of the PCEHR and consider any issues relating to the implementation of its recommendations.

A survey will also shortly be available online at ehealth.gov.au for comments from interested parties. The consultation exercise will be held throughout August, with the survey available until September 1.

As Pulse+IT reported on Tuesday, the release of Deloitte’s “refresh” of the 2008 national eHealth strategy and the eHealth business case for funding by the states and territories will be delayed until the consultations on the PCEHR review are held.

A DoH spokeswoman said the PCEHR review consultations, the strategy refresh and the business case will all be considered by the COAG Standing Council on Health, which includes the federal, state and territory health ministers.

The future of the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), which the reviewers recommended be disbanded, is also expected to be decided at the COAG meeting.

In a letter to the peak bodies, the first assistant secretary for the department’s eHealth division, Linda Powell, said Deloitte was currently finalising dates and venues for the meetings. Ms Powell said the department will also continue to receive any feedback on implementation issues until September 1 through its pcehrreview@health.gov.au email address.

“I apologise for the short notice in advising you about the consultations, but as you will appreciate we have a constrained amount of time to conduct the consultation process and the government is keen to hear the views of peak bodies,” she said.

Amongst the review’s 37 recommendations were advice to change the name of the PCEHR to the MyHR, adopt an opt-out system – which would require a change to the PCEHR Act – decentralise policy standards and frameworks and information sharing, boost secure messaging take-up, create a single sign-on solution, and introduce a meaningful use provision to the eHealth Practice Incentives Program (ePIP).

Deloitte has begun contacting peak bodies, with consumer organisations invited to attend a forum in Melbourne on August 11.