My Health Record to become mobile-compatible from next year
The federal government plans to turn the My Health Record into a mobile-capable platform at some stage next year, allowing app developers access to the platform through a set of conformant application programming interfaces (APIs).
The Department of Health’s special adviser on eHealth Paul Madden told a national Primary Health Network (PHN) forum in Sydney last week that the government will not be developing apps itself, but will make the platform compatible so app developers can have access to it and begin using the data it contains.
“The platform, some time next year, will be turned into a mobile-capable platform,” Mr Madden said. “I don’t mean we will turn out a whole bunch of apps from the government perspective, saying here is the My Health Record on a mobile device, but we will make the platform compatible for apps developers to be able to access the platform, to use the data, to make views of it for clinicians under the current use regime, or for individuals who wish to use that kind of service.”
There is one approved app for the system formerly known as the PCEHR: the Child eHealth Record app, of which there have been 15,731 downloads.
“There are lots and lots of different use cases for apps,” he said. “We want this to be something that apps developers can use and make sense of.”
External software such as GP clinical information systems are able to access the My Health Record system through conformant portals, and this is the plan for mobility as well, he said.
“At the moment, everything is transacting information in and out of the gateway, so we will give it a set of APIs that will make the data accessible and those will become conformant portals.”
Mr Madden also said there were new system releases planned for early next year to support more usability for both consumers and healthcare providers. These are like to be released in March or April.
He also said the department was still working to get pathology and diagnostic imaging providers linked to the system, but that diagnostic imaging reports were now flowing in from the Northern Territory. The NT’s My eHealth Record (MeHR), which has the capability to receive pathology and DI results and reports, is transitioning over to the national system under the M2N project.
There is also work going on with software vendors to map and use terminologies such as SNOMED CT-AU and the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT) within their own systems.
“We have a lot of codified information in the system,” he said. “The way that works at the moment is for a software developer to create a clinical document to send to the system, they have to structure the data in a way that goes to our system so when you interrogate it or when it goes to another system, you will absolutely have certainty that it will look the way it was intended to.
“There is work going on with some of the software vendors to consume the terminologies instead of some of their own terminology sets so that they are able to not only provide information to us in a standard and codified way, but also to use those standards and codes inside their own systems.
“That takes us to another level of the utility of the data across the system, whether it is intended for the eHealth system in a clinical document sense or sharing into the future using techniques and technologies like FHIR, for example.
“Information which is stored both within a clinical information system or an eHealth system of a national kind or an EMR for a hospital, if all of those were carrying information about a medication using the same coded terminology, we are in a much stronger place than where we are at the moment.”
He also revealed that work was currently ongoing involving NEHTA and some of the secure messaging service vendors to keep trying to solve the seemingly intractable problem of lack of technical and commercial interoperability between vendors.
While there are quite a few technical problems to be overcome to allow one brand of clinical software to send and receive messages using different secure messaging services to another brand of clinical software, those problems are seen as surmountable.
What don’t seem to be surmountable are the commercial considerations of the vendors. Mr Madden said NEHTA was currently working with them and the jurisdictions to try to solve the impasse.
He said planning for the two trials of opt-out models in northern Queensland and the Nepean Blue Mountains region of NSW has begun, with the first planning session taking place the week before last. Planning will start to ramp up as we head into Christmas, he said.
The vexed issue of revised incentives for GPs to use the system is still under consideration, he said. The RACGP has been lobbying hard against proposals that the Practice Incentive Program payment for eHealth (ePIP) be linked to actual use of the My Health Record.
Mr Madden said a decision on whether to proceed with those proposals had yet to be made.
Also yet to be decided is the role that PHNs will play in the system. While eHealth is listed as one of the six priority areas for the PHNs, they have not received the sort of special funding for eHealth activities that marked the Medicare Local years.
Mr Madden said key performance indicators for PHNs and their role in eHealth will be discussed at another national PHN conference next month.
In the meantime, close to 2.5 million people are now registered to use the My Health Record, with between 1500 and 2000 signing up each day.