Holiday reading: Telehealth

Pulse+IT is taking a break from daily news reporting for the festive season but will return on Monday, January 5.

If you are after some holiday reading, you may like to review our 2014 Telehealth magazine online below. This and other editions of Pulse+IT are available via the ‘Magazines’ menu at the top of this site, and also via the Issuu app for iOS and Android devices.

Holiday reading: National eHealth Agenda

Pulse+IT is taking a break from daily news reporting for the festive season but will return on Monday, January 5.

If you are after some holiday reading, you may like to review our 2014 National eHealth Agenda magazine online below. This and other editions of Pulse+IT are available via the ‘Magazines’ menu at the top of this site, and also via the Issuu app for iOS and Android devices.

Holiday reading: Acute Care ICT & eHealth

Pulse+IT is taking a break from daily news reporting for the festive season but will return on Monday, January 5.

If you are after some holiday reading, you may like to review our 2014 Acute Care ICT & eHealth magazine online below. This and other editions of Pulse+IT are available via the ‘Magazines’ menu at the top of this site, and also via the Issuu app for iOS and Android devices.

Holiday reading: Aged Care ICT & eHealth

Pulse+IT is taking a break from daily news reporting for the festive season but will return on Monday, January 5.

If you are after some holiday reading, you may like to review our 2014 Aged Care ICT & eHealth magazine online below. This and other editions of Pulse+IT are available via the ‘Magazines’ menu at the top of this site, and also via the Issuu app for iOS and Android devices.

Holiday reading: Practice ICT & eHealth

Pulse+IT is taking a break from daily news reporting for the festive season but will return on Monday, January 5.

If you are after some holiday reading, you may like to review our 2014 Practice ICT & eHealth magazine online below. This and other editions of Pulse+IT are available via the ‘Magazines’ menu at the top of this site, and also via the Issuu app for iOS and Android devices.

Holiday reading: New Zealand eHealth

Pulse+IT is taking a break from daily news reporting for the festive season but will return on Monday, January 5.

If you are after some holiday reading, you may like to review our 2014 New Zealand eHealth magazine online below. This and other editions of Pulse+IT are available via the ‘Magazines’ menu at the top of this site, and also via the Issuu app for iOS and Android devices.

Holiday reading: Mobile Health

Pulse+IT is taking a break from daily news reporting for the festive season but will return on Monday, January 5.

If you are after some holiday reading, you may like to review our 2014 Mobile Health magazine online below. This and other editions of Pulse+IT are available via the ‘Magazines’ menu at the top of this site, and also via the Issuu app for iOS and Android devices.

The 2014 eHealth year in review: part four

In what was a big year of budgets, reviews and belt-tightening, it was the major investments being made by Telstra Health that caught the attention as the year came to a close. Health IT is a sceptical industry at the best of times and its people will reserve their judgement, but it is hard not to proclaim 2014 as the year of Telstra.

In early October, UnitingCare director and noted reviewer Richard Royle got to show off his $96 million baby when St Stephen’s Private Hospital in Hervey Bay opened. The fully integrated hospital predominantly runs off a suite of clinical software from Cerner, a set-up that Mr Royle compared favourably to the best of breed approach taken at another landmark hospital that opened this year, Fiona Stanley in Perth.

St Stephen’s would receive notification in December that it had achieved HIMSS level 6 due to its super-duper, closed-loop medications management system. It also received special dispensation from the federal government to trial paperless prescribing.

The tiny towns of Tara and Wandoan in the western Darling Downs joined Dalby, Chinchilla and Miles as part of the Centre for Online Health’s Health-e-Regions project, allowing patients and local clinicians to video conference with specialists from hospitals in Toowoomba and Brisbane.

In mid-October, the long-awaited boundaries for the 30 new Primary Health Networks (PHNs) were released, the number a little higher than expected. We speculated that many regional sub-offices will need to be established for rural areas in WA, SA, Queensland and western NSW considering the vast distances the PHN will be responsible for. (The individual PHNs can be viewed on the National Health Performance Authority’s My Healthy Communities website.)

There was plenty of action in the online appointment booking market this year, with MedicalDirector announcing back in August that it plans to offer an online appointments booking module fully integrated into PracSoft in its next release.

Launceston-based DocAppointments added a number of new features to its various offerings throughout the year, including a patient demographics and survey app and a customised app service, but the big shake-up in the market came at the end of October, when market leader HealthEngine announced it would offer its online booking system to AGPAL-accredited practices for free.

The second half of the year turned out to be a relatively quiet time for the primary care software vendors, which would have come as a relief after the huge amount of work they have been asked to do in preparing for the PCEHR and the requirements of the eHealth Practice Incentives Program (ePIP) over the last couple of years. Most vendors were able to turn their attention to developing new features and attending to the needs of their users, although they were briefly threatened with having to drop everything to prepare for the proposed $7 GP co-payment. Most vendors we spoke to weren’t having a bar of it.

In aged care, things got interesting as the sector became increasingly nervous about the Department of Social Services’ (DSS) plans for the Aged Care Gateway and the associated central client record. Back in July, a room full of aged care movers and shakers at the ITAC conference got a bit het up about the ”policy silliness” of the possibility that they’d have to deal with two eHealth records rather than one.

In November, DSS tried to hose down concerns by saying that the central client record would not include medical information, but it also admitted that the record would go live without a link to the PCEHR. What the aged care sector wants is to see the two records integrated through the same platform, or better yet, a single record.

In acute care, a few problems were emerging. A bug was discovered in the MetaVision intensive care software package being rolled out in several Brisbane hospitals with the potential to cause serious harm. It turned out that a fix was being prepared but that didn’t stop some from going to town on the situation.

In South Australia, the grumblings about the implementation of the new Electronic Patient Administration System (EPAS) from Allscripts grew to a bit of a roar with the release of a report by the SA Auditor-General, Simon O’Neill. Mr O’Neill warned that the delay in the system’s roll-out, mounting costs and a backlash from clinicians at at least one of the three hospitals it is installed in would have a serious effect on the design and build of the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, due to open in 2016.

EPAS also turns out to be the reason why the three hospitals have had to switch off PCEHR functionality for the time being.

News on the PCEHR was predominantly confined to the ongoing drama that is the design of a model to upload pathology and diagnostic imaging reports, as well as how to get the private hospital sector on board. A few eyebrows were raised – not the least in the aged care sector, which has received no incentive to partake – when funds, small as there were, became available to connect private hospitals.

As reported in August, it appeared that the Department of Health had decided to drop the previously favoured authority to post method for uploading pathology reports in favour of an automatic upload with a seven-day delay before consumers could see them. This reared up again in late October when the new RACGP president got wind of it and arced up a bit.

To allay some of the fears of general practitioners, DoH said it was working on a way to ensure that a method was devised so that sensitive reports didn’t go up or that uploads could be prevented if a consumer withdrew their consent.

Debate still rumbled, however. Pulse+IT had the pleasure of publishing a very timely article prepared by the Australasian College of Health Informatics’ (ACHI) program evaluation sub-committee, which involved a review of the evidence of benefit or harm from allowing patients to view their test results.

The RACGP put forward its view, as did the Consumers Health Forum, but as it turns out, release five of the PCEHR went live with a spot for pathology and DI reports anyway. (Not that any reports will go up any time soon, as the high-level design for the model is not yet complete.)

The drawn-out battle to get the national Electronic Reporting and Recording of Controlled Drugs (ERRCD) system up and running reared its head again, following the release of another coroner’s report into a misadventure with prescription drugs. The AMA’s Victorian branch kept up its lobbying for its introduction, this time to the newly elected Labor government, but in the meantime, electronic prescription exchange vendor MediSecure announced it might have a simpler, faster alternative. The RACGP announced it would prefer the ERRCD with a few changes, but was open to accepting an interim measure.

Adoption of the cloud for healthcare purposes got a massive boost in October when Microsoft announced it had opened two new data centres in Victoria and NSW for its Azure cloud platform. The hope is that the new Azure Australia geographies will encourage the government to do more in cloud services if data sovereignty is assured. Telstra and Dimension Data also announced in December that they were both launching government-centred cloud services.

Things that caught our eye at the end of the year include:

The Year of Telstra

As Pulse+IT’s list of our top 20 news stories for 2014 shows, a huge amount of interest was garnered by the various doings of Telstra Health, which kept on coming in the final quarter of the year and lets us safely name 2014 as the Year of Telstra.

Evidence of that interest was felt with Telstra Health’s attendance at ITAC and HIC but it built to a crescendo when the business unit had its official launch in Sydney in October, where it announced a number of new ventures, not the least of which was the establishment of a new telehealth service called Telstra ReadyCare, which will allow patients to consult directly with GPs over the phone or by video conference, 24 hours a day.

The move did gain some criticism from the AMA and ACRRM, but as Telstra Health managing director Shane Solomon explained, the plan was to offer the service to GPs, particularly in rural and remote areas.

Telstra also announced it had been chosen by NT Health to build a National Telehealth Connection Service to become a foundation for connecting video consultations around the country.

Then the investments and acquisitions began to flow. In addition to last year’s investments in firms like HealthEngine, Fred IT, Verdi and HealthConnex, and July’s acquisition of Medinexus, in quick succession Telstra announced:

Telstra Health now has a portfolio of companies, products and investments that reaches into every facet of Australia’s healthcare system, from GPs to pharmacy, community care, residential aged care, hospitals and telehealth. Next year, it will be fascinating to see what comes of it all.

The hot top 20: most-read stories on Pulse+IT in 2014

In a year dominated by the PCEHR, the budget, the fate of Medicare Locals and the emergence of Telstra Health as a major player in the health IT sector, it was the first step into the Australian market by a US firm that registered as the most popular story for Pulse+IT readers in 2014.

1. Epic wins the tender to deliver an EMR for Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital

2. The 61 Medicare Locals got sliced and diced into 30 PHNs

3. Orion Health announces its plans to play with the big boys

4. It’s a story from last year, but that didn’t stop people reading about Telstra’s plans for eHealth

5. Medibank decided not to pursue its personal health record, healthbook

6. Telstra’s big telehealth announcement garnered big views

7. Health Minister Peter Dutton says Medicare Locals will be cut, but that he had no plan B for the GP co-pay

8. PCEHR stories rated well, including this one on $140 million to keep it going for another year

9. And this one, on the belated release of the Royle review

10. This was a surprise: the Triple Zero app for emergencies

11. Telstra’s acquisition of aged care market leader iCareHealth added to its burgeoning portfolio

12. The fully integrated St Stephen’s Private at Hervey Bay was a publicity machine for UnitingCare

13. Security expert Steve Wilson gave good headline for this story on a security flaw in the myGov website

14. As did Telstra Health’s Bronwyn Pike for this story on Telstra’s jumbo telehealth plans

15. There’s that name again, this time for the acquisition of Emerging Systems

16. The news that Medicare Locals had lost funding for their eHealth programs was not unexpected

17. As Pulse+IT had reported the cuts in April

18. Professor Horvath’s review of Medicare Locals was pretty much accepted in full by the government

19. All Telstra, all the time, even from last year

20. The Instagram for doctors app rounds out the top 20.

PCEHR registrations reach two million

Consumer registrations for the PCEHR have reached the two million mark, with the latest statistics from the Department of Health showing that 2,015,624 consumers have now signed up.

As of midnight on Wednesday, December 17, the figures also show that 7600 healthcare provider organisations are registered, including general practices, pharmacies, aged care facilities and hospitals.

The number of shared health summaries uploaded is still lagging considerably, with only 38,207 SHSs on the system.

However, the number of discharge summaries uploaded has reached 85,960, along with 7083 event summaries.

There are currently 1,056,788 prescription and dispense records held in the National Prescription and Dispense Repository (NPDR).

In terms of views of the system, in the week of December 4 to 10, consumers viewed their records 8485 times, but clinical views were very low during the period, with only 560 clinicians viewing the PCEHR that week.