As Australian GP Practices apply for eHealth Practice Incentive Payments (PIP) they will need compliant Secure Messaging software in place.  Healthlink is an eligible supplier of Secure Messaging Capability as listed on the NEHTA website.

The deadline for PIP applications for the first quarter incentive payments is rapidly approaching.  Requirement 2 of the PIP guidelines state that by 1st February 2013 the practice must;

1) Apply for a digital certificate for Secure Messaging (NASH PKI)
2) Have a standard compliant product (HealthLink HMS 6.6.3) or written commitment from a PIP eHealth Product Register for Secure Messaging that their listed product will be available to the practice in accordance with the timeline in the Commissioning Requirements for Secure Message Delivery
3) Have a written policy to encourage messaging use

HealthLink is Australia’s largest Secure Messaging Network and is a  standards compliant product providing your practice with the capability to both send and receive messages with other Health Care providers. With HealthLink’s HMS 6.6.3 already installed in Australian GP practices, GP sites will meet the requirements set out in the  eHealth PIP Incentive Guidelines.

Additionally by 1st August 2013 GP sites must meet the Commissioning Requirements for Secure Messaging.  HealthLink has been contacting sites to help complete PIP prerequisites (HPI-O, NASH certificates, CSP Link), test your secure messaging and provide you with compliance verification.

HealthLink will be able to provide you with a record of secure messaging to measure and assess your progress against the policy objective of increasing the use of sending and receiving secure electronic messages.

HealthLink continues to work with organisations and vendors across Australia in implementing compliant secure message exchange.  We have project managers, technical analysts and deployment teams ensuring these implementations work smoothly and effectively to improve clinical safety and patient outcomes.

To register your interest in Secure Messaging and receive your Secure Messaging Certification contact our Australian Help Desk on 1800 125 036 or email ehealth@healthlink.net.

Thanks to everyone who sent in their ideas for blog articles for 2013, as part of our “Win a Gourmet Lunch” competition this week.   A $100 restaurant voucher is winding its way to each of the following winners as I write:

• Judy Leishman, Practice Manager at Manly Medical Centre, would like to read more articles about updates in technology, comparisons between different systems, legislative requirements re health information and anything that would make her life easier in administration.
• Jane Ireland from HealthShare suggests we write more in 2013 on primary and secondary integration, regional initiatives and innovative learning.
• Dave Mitchell from Pegasus Health wants to read more about privacy with regards to shared care.
• Rex Browne from Anne St Medical says it would be interesting for prospective cloud immigrants to know what cloud platforms support which HealthLink accessed services.

Happy Christmas!

It’s now only 8 more sleeps until the big day and if you’re anything like me, after a busy and productive year, you’ll be wondering where 2012 went!

The HealthLink team and I would like to wish you and your family a wonderful Christmas day and holiday season and a 2013 full of good health, success and happiness.  And of course, a big “thank you” for your continued support and custom over the year.

Win Lunch On Us!

As a special thank you to you our readers for supporting our blog this year, we’re giving away three gourmet lunch vouchers worth $80 each, redeemable at a wide selection of top restaurants.  To go in the draw, simply email us at: blog@healthlink.net with your name, postal address and phone number and tell us what type of information and articles you would like to see on our blog in 2013.  Be quick though – to be eligible, your email must be received by 5pm Wednesday 19 December 2012! Winners will be notified directly by phone or email by 5pm Friday 21st December.

PS.  We will be open on every working day throughout the holiday period providing you with customer support.

New Zealand has been given Number 1 ranking in the level of cross-sector health information exchange by The Commonwealth Fund in its 2012 survey of eleven countries.  Previous Commonwealth Fund studies have given New Zealand high rankings in various surveys but this is the first one that has focused directly on the level of Health Information Exchange (HIE).

It is interesting to note that countries such as the US, Canada and even Australia are still well behind New Zealand in terms of HIE.  Twenty years of concerted effort has placed us narrowly ahead of Sweden, The Netherlands and Switzerland.  You can access the charts from The Commonwealth Fund’s 2012 survey here.

What this survey did not reveal is the extent of information exchange taking place.  Not only can New Zealand’s practices exchange information with a few other parties (as now happens in most other countries), they can exchange information with almost anyone they choose.  Currently the average New Zealand general practice exchanges information with over 70 other parties in any given month (see graph below).

Most of this communication uses the messaging systems that HealthLink has now had in place for many years but increasingly practices are beginning to use online referrals, eLab and similar online services which have now been installed in approximately 50% of New Zealand’s general practices over the past two years.

If you would like to know more about what HealthLink is doing with its new range of online services or about ways in which electronic messaging can be utilised to streamline healthcare delivery, please feel free to contact me.

One of the fastest growing areas of eHealth is that of online enquiry into GP and pharmacy records.  CareInsight is a leading tool for performing online enquiries and over the past year has really proved its worth.  As you can see from the graph below, the look-up numbers are climbing very fast, with nearly 1,000 successful queries performed in November alone.  CareInsight is now installed in the Hawkes Bay, Nelson, Gisborne and right across Northland (including hospital and after hours facilities in Whangarei, Dargaville, The Bay of Islands and Kaitaia).  The sheer usefulness of the CareInsight system has sparked considerable interest from both New Zealand and Australia; where we will begin offering services in the new year.

New CareInsight Products – Soon To Be Released

We are pleased to announce that we will be offering three distinct CareInsight services during 2013:

• CareInsight Pharmacy – providing the ability for pharmacies to ask for information they need for long term care of patients

• CareInsight Population Health – Allowing access to information across multiple systems in order to provide detailed and up-to-date information about a patient or group of patients, and;

• CareInsight ED – The initial CareInsight system now widely used in ED and after hours centres.

Both CareInsight Pharmacy and CareInsight Population Health are being designed to meet the specific needs of users and to ensure that the privacy principles set out in the CareInsight Privacy Impact Assessment are adhered to.

If you would like to know more about what HealthLink is doing with its new range of online services or about ways in which electronic messaging can be utilised to streamline healthcare delivery, please feel free to contact me.

We are now fast approaching the annual HINZ conference which is a major event on the New Zealand health informatics calendar.  This year we have a number of outstanding international speakers including:

• Bill Pascal, Chief Information Officer of The Canadian Medical Association
• Dr Claudia Pagliari, a world expert in Health Informatics governance from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland
• Pirkko Kouri, Principal Lecturer in Health Care Technology, Savonia University of Applied Sciences, Finland
• Emma Hossack, CEO of Extensia Pty Ltd, Brisbane

We also have a tremendous line up of Australian speakers, locally produced papers and for the third year, the highly successful Clinicians’ Challenge.  The theme of this year’s conference is Health Informatics into Clinical Practice.

You can take a look at what is happening at the Health Informatics NZ website.

Attending HINZ is important.  It is the one event that everyone in the industry attends.  HINZ is the place to catch up with developments across the industry and to catch up with colleagues and even competitors.  Please get onto the HINZ website and take a look at what is on offer this year.  I look forward to seeing you there.

Have you ever noticed how much better you get at doing something difficult – with lots of practice?  This is certainly true of developing online referral technology.  Northland Health was among the first DHBs in the country to implement an eReferral system (in March 2009).  Today approximately 90% of all GP referrals to Northland Health are arriving electronically.  Please take a look at a video we have just completed detailing the recent experiences of the people involved in the Northland eReferral project.

In this short video presentation, Dr Dianne Davis, practicing GP and GP Liaison Officer explains the journey that Northland has been on over the past three years and the way in which they have been able to achieve a range of efficiencies in dealing with incoming referrals.  Once upon a time an incoming referral passed through 11 pairs of hands.  As Dianne says, those were 11 opportunities for a referral to be delayed or lost.  Today, the entire process of receiving a referral is electronic.  Clearly, a stepped implementation process, continuous review of improvements and incremental adjustment to improve further has stood them in very good stead. Both Northland Health and the region’s GPs are getting significant productivity gains and are becoming more and more confident in the robustness and security of the online referral process.

A key driver of this improvement has been use of the HISO 10014.2 online forms standard and this should reinforce once again the huge power of standardisation and the impact it can have on automating routine processes within our health system.  We are very pleased to be at the forefront of promoting and improving standardisation which we see as being fundamental to the development of interoperability within the sector.

I would like to pay tribute to Dianne Davis and her colleagues and the wonderful work they have done to push the boundaries of electronic referrals use.  They have been leaders in  eReferral development for several years.  Also due a lot of credit for the success of this initiative are Lisa Wickham and Chris Farrelly of Whangarei’s Manaia PHO and Ken Leech of Procon Consulting (head of the Northland Primary Care Information Group). Excellent and sustained teamwork between PHO and DHB is now paying huge dividends for the people of Northland. We’d also like to acknowledge the teamwork of people from electronic medical records (EMR) vendors Medtech and My Practice.  Their efforts are also fundamentally important to the success of this endeavour.

For further details about HealthLink’s eReferrals capabilities, including gaining access to a demonstration system, click here.

When a patient arrives at a hospital emergency department it is probably one of the most distressing experiences they will ever have.  So it is essential that we do everything to ensure that each and every emergency department visit goes as well as possible.  By having information about a patient’s existing medical conditions, current treatment plan and medication history ED staff get a “running start” in terms of getting their emergency care underway.  CareInsight is a system that makes that possible.  The CareInsight system is a world first in its field.  It is an online system that hospital and after-hours clinicians use to obtain important information about ED patients, directly from their general practices and pharmacies’ medical records systems.

CareInsight provides an instant window into the patient’s relevant medical details and provides hospital ED staff with the totally reliable and up-to-date information that they need to make the right interventions and get urgent treatements underway swiftly and confidently.

A few weeks ago in the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board region, ED staff performed 122 successful CareInsight lookups.  Usage has been growing steadily over the past year but this is a new record.

Now in daily use for over a year, CareInsight is really proving its worth and has become an essential ED tool.  Five regions have now implemented CareInsight or are in the process of rolling it out.  It’s interesting to dwell on the proposition that if the results gained in the Hawke’s Bay were extrapolated across New Zealand*, more than 6,000 lookups would have occurred last week.

To learn more about CareInsight, you can view the video below or refer to our Privacy Impact Assessment.

*Hawke’s Bay is home to 2% of New Zealand’s population.

The New Zealand health sector has one of the highest levels of clinical messaging in the world – by my estimation we are second behind Denmark.  Clinical messaging has a wide range of uses, predominantly it is used for the exchange of pathology and radiology reports, specialist letters, discharge summaries and to send information to and from a range of databases.

Growth in Electronic Clinical Messaging in the New Zealand and Australian Health Sectors

As you can see from the graph above, clinical messaging is growing steadily each year in both New Zealand and Australia.  Approximately 70 million messages are sent annually between more than 9,000 healthcare organisations, spread across both countries.  Key to this growth is the realisation by clinicians that electronic communication is a simple, reliable, low cost way to replace paper with a far more efficient communications medium.

The Average General Practice Exchanges Information Electronically with More than 50 Other Healthcare Organisations Each Month

Today the average New Zealand general practice exchanges information electronically with more than 50 other healthcare provider organisations every month.  This means that the amount of paper being sent from one practice to another has reduced markedly.  The growth in electronic communications combined with better and better electronic medical records is having a very beneficial effect on the New Zealand health system, which is acknowledged as being one of the world’s most efficient.

If you would like to know more about what HealthLink is doing with its new range of online services or about ways in which electronic messaging can be utilised to streamline healthcare delivery, please don’t hesitate to contact me. 

Earlier this month, we hit the major milestone of 10,000 eReferrals received by Auckland’s DHBs (Auckland, Waitemata and Counties Manukau).  The split was geographically even across the Auckland metro region:

Two hundred and forty nine or 77% of Auckland practices were using eReferrals as at the beginning of the month.  The top ten eReferrals by service were:

For further information on the CareConnect eReferrals Project, please visit the CareConnect eReferrals website: www.ereferrals.co.nz.