Exploring by Country: Australia

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.

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.

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. 

In today’s electronically connected world, we press a button on a keyboard and we expect an email to arrive at its destination.  Did you know that that’s not always the case?  How many times have you been told that your recipient never received that email?  Did they overlook it?  Did it get swallowed by the SPAM filter, the local filter, the company filter, or the ISP filter?  Or was it ‘lost in the post’?  When do you, the sender, first know that it’s not arrived?  The most common email systems recognise there are issues here and have the ability to request a ‘read receipt’.  But not only is it optional to request a read recipient, it’s optional to respond to it.

In the clinical world, there is already plenty of historical evidence of paper communication going astray, but in the electronic clinical world help is at hand.  There is a recognised standard to ensure that you, the sender, know that the clinical information you send is correctly received and imported by the recipient system.  The HL7 application “acknowledgement” message is specified in the International and Australian HL7 standards to acknowledge that your message has been successfully imported into the recipient clinical system and waiting to be read and actioned appropriately.

The problem?

Not every computer EMR system in the health sector has implemented HL7 along with its application acknowledgements.  To encourage EMR vendors to continue improving the quality of electronic messaging and to ensure their systems are interoperable, HealthLink has decided to investigate this small area of HL7 compliance and to publish our findings.  It is imperative that every electronic message is received by the intended recipient in exactly the manner and format intended.

HealthLink has started contacting the seventy+ EMR vendors whose customers have dealings with Healthlink, inviting them to confirm their capabilities.  We plan to collate and publish this information in the October issue of Pulse+IT magazine to better inform the wider health community.

Photo by Simon Clark/FarmerClark.com

It certainly seems a long time since I was a young Telecom exec,  setting up HealthLink as a specialised Telecom service!  We are now doing rather a lot of healthcare sector integration, delivering over 65 million items of clinical information per year, across New Zealand, Australia and now Canada.  With our recent expansion into Canada and growing demand in Australasia, the future looks bright.  But our key focus is still on service quality rather than service expansion.

You can read more about HealthLink’s origin and history in this week’s NZ Herald article, as well as learn about our three newest services, CareConnect eReferrals, CareInsight and eLab.

As the journey to the PCEHR begins its approach to the station, is the end result going to be a smooth disembarkation or an absolute train wreck? The answer may lie somewhere in between, but whatever happens, it is important that the work already done on standards, terminologies and the foundation pieces of eHealth are not lost for the future.

Read the rest of my article on PCEHR here, at Pulse + IT magazine.

Have Your Say

Will the PCEHR have a happy ending or will it be a complete train wreck?  To leave a comment, click on the title of this article or the comment link just below the title.  You will see the comment section at the bottom of that page.

Be sure to drop by the HealthLink stand at the Best Practice Summit this week to learn how to get the best out of your HealthLink account. My colleague, Rajab, and I will be showing you how to leverage the largest secure messaging network in Australia, enabling you to exchange information with over 10,000 other healthcare organisations. We’ll also be discussing how the Wave 1 and Wave 2 PCEHR programmes will affect you (HealthLink is a lead SMD service provider for these programmes).

As usual, we’ll have an iPad 2 up for grabs, so make sure you drop by the HealthLink stand and enter!

In the meantime, or if you are not able to attend the Summit, check out our updated training videos for sending a referral letter or setting up a new messaging contact in Best Practice.

It’s shaping up to be a great Summit packed with plenty of learning, fun and sight-seeing. And fingers crossed, we might even catch a glimpse of a nesting turtle or two. See you there!

January provides the opportunity to reflect on the previous year and the experiences we enjoyed and learnt from, both in our working and personal lives.  What experiences in 2011 enabled you to grow and develop?  For me, it was leading a team of Diocesan students to victory in a Dragon Boating Challenge.

I started coaching Dragon Boating in 2007 after being invited by Busting With Life, a woman’s breast cancer survivor’s team. I had just spent the previous year as their sweep, working with the coach of the corporate dragon boat team I had been a member of for seven years. Apart from five years of waka-ama outrigger canoe training, I had little coaching experience to offer but trained under an excellent coach. With a little trepidation, I then proceeded to take Busting With Life to win three consecutive nationals competitions.

Dragon Boating and breast cancer research has an interesting history which can be read in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Besides the physiotherapeutic benefits researched here, I can attest to the social benefits, and I have no doubt there are psychological benefits to a team sport amongst members who have gone through traumatic experiences and live in fear of its reoccurrence.

Sean Ogden leads the Diocesan School for Girls Dragon Boating team to victory

Over the years my team of women have become family. One is the sister-in-law of Jo Robertson, the Leadership Programme Director of Diocesan School for Girls. When I was asked if I could help with coaching year 10 girls in a Dragon Boating Challenge, I was more than willing. Not only was this an opportunity for the girls, the Auckland Dragon Boating Association (ADBA) and the sport in general, but it was an opportunity for me to test my abilities to convey what I had learned in leading a dragon boat team. This was not just a coaching exercise. I was not being asked to baby-sit. I was being asked to teach these girls what it takes to succeed.

Leadership is a quality that HealthLink actively encourages in its employees and since the Dragon Boating event was in syngery, HealthLink had no problem donating my time to the cause.

Continue reading »

It is often easier to say nothing and hope things will sort themselves out.  However, when you you see the same mistakes about to occur again it is time to say something. At HealthLink we are passionate about what we are doing. We are adamant that we must learn from both the lessons of failure and the lessons of success.  Both Tom Bowden and myself have written and spoken about incremental steps in progressing the eHealth agenda and getting the fundamental building blocks right before embarking on lofty ideals.  Our submission to the PCEHR Inquiry was focused on this philosophy.  It seems to have hit the mark in the media…

Read Thursday’s full article at The Australian, including details of our submission on the PCEHR project.  You can find our submission here as well as track the other submissions received by the committee.

What are your thoughts on Australia’s PCEHR plan?  We would love to hear your comments…