This was the title of a recent article in the Australian.

There is no doubt it true and the suggestion was the bypass NEHTA to change it?

There is a trend that keeps repeating here, every version of Health connect survived for a few years and then was axed because of lack of progress. Sometimes the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. We have had several declarations that HL7 V2 is going to be the messaging standard that Australia will use, but every new iteration says – No we will look at the situation and decide and everything goes to sleep yet again. NEHTA has at least realised that the only sensible way forward in Australia is with HL7 V2. They are probably in the mood to listen to industry and be more enablers than standard creators and perhaps disbanding NEHTA is not the best way forward.

There are a few things that we clearly need:

Resourcing of Standards Australia – Currently run on a shoestring

Involvement of Technical People – Almost absent from the process  – probably through frustration

Compliance with Standards – Ideally this would start with the state health departments!

Certification of Software – we don’t use untested Medication! so why is software not tested?

Support of R&D – eHeath requires this as there is so much yet to be discovered

Somehow the industry needs to get back a solid direction so that we can start some incremental improvements towards a common goal. At the moment there is a complete lack of technical direction.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under EHR, HL7, STANDARDS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.