Many foundational tasks of the national interoperability plan are completed but the complex stuff is still to come, according to the Agency’s latest update.
The Australian Digital Health Agency is reporting steady progress on its national interoperability agenda, with the latest quarterly update showing around 75% of the plan’s 44 actions are now marked as complete.
Foundational work such as standards and governance is largely finished, with more complex system-wide reforms – particularly around information sharing and legislation – still in progress or yet to start.
The plan, released in July 2023, set out a five-year pathway to enable secure, seamless sharing of health information across Australia’s fragmented health system.
Two and a half years in, Sandra Cook, the manager of the Agency’s connected care branch, told TMR that “things are going pretty well”.
“It would be a bit unrealistic for us to say that we 100% feel like everything’s going to be done [by 2028],” she said.
“We definitely are tracking risks associated with all of our actions. But right now, we’re not signalling any specific actions as expected to being missed by 2028.”
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Two additional actions were completed during the March quarter, according to the report, both in areas the agency has been prioritising:
- HL7 FHIR AU usage (Action 2.3) – the rollout and expansion of national interoperability standards across digital health systems has now been completed, with ongoing work shifting to maintenance and implementation.
- Interoperability workforce (Action 4.2) – the Agency has finalised key elements of its workforce and education roadmap, including new training resources and courses aimed at building digital health capability.
According to the report, entire categories of the plan are now fully delivered:
- Innovation (Priority Area 4) is 100% complete;
- Benefits (Priority Area 5) is 100% complete;
- Standards (Priority Area 2) – 13 of 14 actions have been completed.
In addition, four of 10 actions under Identity (Priority Area 1) have been completed.
Much of this completed work relates to:
- establishing national standards (including FHIR)
- developing governance frameworks
- producing guidance, training and policy tools
The agency has also indicated it would no longer report on completed actions, narrowing future updates to outstanding work.
What remains “on track”
A number of substantial components of the interoperability plan remain ongoing.
The most significant gap is in Information Sharing (Priority Area 3), where eight of 12 actions are complete.
Key initiatives still listed as “on track” include:
- development of a national information-sharing authorisation framework;
- legislative harmonisation across jurisdictions;
- rollout of API-based data exchange infrastructure;
- implementation of national service catalogues and marketplaces.
Similarly, several identity-related actions – including improvements to data matching, provider directories, and system integration – remain in progress.
While all are reported as “on track”, many have been ongoing since the plan’s early stages and are dependent on coordination between federal, state and territory governments.
“That is a challenge,” Ms Cook acknowledged.
“We’ve tried as the Agency to lead this as best we can and deliver all of the things that are our key responsibility.
“But we do have to work with other stakeholders as well. And sometimes there’s complexity in doing that.
“There are eight different jurisdictions we have to work with. And they also have different maturity levels.
“WA have been out for a request for information for a statewide electronic medical record. Tasmania hasn’t quite signed a contract yet for theirs, but then we’ve got Queensland and New South Wales that have got coverage.
“ACT’s got a statewide [EMR], South Australia’s got a statewide [EMR].
“And then you’ve got the complexity of Victoria that has multiple different governance bodies within it.
“But we are feeling relatively comfortable with where people are reporting,” she said.
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What has not yet started
The report also confirmed that some activities have not yet commenced, with delivery scheduled for later years of the program.
These include:
- Consumer-empowered data matching;
- Clinical systems architecture and design;
- Use of healthcare identifiers in consumer applications.
Most of these are slated for 2026–27 or later, placing them in the latter half of the five-year roadmap.
Progress against the 2023 roadmap
When the interoperability plan was launched in 2023, it outlined a staged approach, with the early years focused on foundations (standards, identifiers, governance), and the later years to focus on implementation and real-world data sharing.
The latest report suggests the program is broadly tracking along that path, with foundational elements largely complete, but also highlights that the most complex and critical components are still to be delivered.
