Sounds dull, but Agency CDO Peter O’Halloran has promised interoperability that will open the Australian market to the world.
The Australian Digital Health Agency launched its National Framework for Digital Health Standards on Wednesday at the Digital Health Festival in Melbourne.
Chief digital officer of the ADHA and self-described “standards nerd” Peter O’Halloran made the announcement during a news-filled presentation this morning.
With just 42 days until the go-live of the next tranche Sharing by Default legislation on 1 July, Mr O’Halloran said the framework was a key deliverable for the Agency.
“As pathology and diagnostic imaging reports are increasingly shared to My Health Record ahead of the 1 July mandate, the number of times Australians have viewed this information has grown significantly – by 112% (from 54 million to 114 million) and 72% (6.5 million to 11.2 million), respectively, over the past year,” Mr O’Halloran said.
“As mandatory sharing expands to more key health information, scalable and conformant national digital infrastructure becomes critical to safe, reliable information sharing across the health system.
“Conformance built on consistent standards gives Australians confidence that digital health systems can work together as intended, and that the information healthcare providers rely on is timely, accurate, secure and clinically safe.
“The adoption of globally consistent clinical terminology is a key foundation for the safe and appropriate use of artificial intelligence in healthcare.”
The framework, he told delegates at DHF26, was “38 pages of pure joy”.
The framework reflects the Agency’s adoption of a three-pronged approach to digital health standards, he said.
“We are adopting international standards where they exist as much as possible,” he said.
“We are adapting those standards to the Australian context where we need to, and we are creating standards where none exist.”
Mr O’Halloran said the framework would open up the Australian market to overseas players and would also allow Australian operators to export their products to the world.
“The standards framework,” he said, “creates interoperability and ultimately that will deliver connected care.
“If we are still talking about digital health in five years’ time, we’ve failed.”
Mr O’Halloran also announced that within the “next few months” patients would be able to receive notifications from the 1800Medicare app on their phone without needing to go to the app first – much as other applications on mobile phones do.
This would mean patients would know immediately when test results were available, appointments or vaccinations were due, and other information.
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Clinicians will also get a similar functionality within their practice management software, but that was taking more time to develop, he said.
Also new was Mr O’Halloran’s announcement that within 10 years every Australian would have a “digital twin” within the My Health Record environment.
In answer to a complaint about the My Health Record log-in process, Mr O’Halloran promised improvements were coming.
“We are doing something in the next couple of months that will make that process much easier,” he said.
Consumer-created content will also become easier to upload to the MHR, he said, but that improvement would likely take another two years to develop.
Read the National Framework for Digital Health Standards here.
