Personal Health Record:E-Health vetting plan abandoned

From The Australian IT:

A broad range of bodies, including the Consumers Health Forum, the Australian Privacy Foundation, the Pharmacy Guild, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists, the Medical History Software Industry Association and individual vendors have called for the establishment of a broad-based new PCEHR governance structure.

But in an addendum to the PCEHR Concept of Operations issued late Wednesday, Health says the departmental secretary will take on the role permanently, with a small caveat that “another body established by a law of the Commonwealth may be prescribed by the regulations to be the System Operator in the future, if necessary”.

The policy previously stated that “The PCEHR health information system would be managed by a single System Operator under a governance model that would be defined in the future”.

Now, the department says: “Having the Secretary of the Department as the System Operator will ensure accountability and transparency of operations and coverage by commonwealth financial, data security and privacy arrangements.

“It will also allow a smooth transition from contractual governance arrangements established for the system build, and the ability to coordinate the necessary jurisdictional and stakeholder involvement.”

The operator will be aided by a Jurisdictional Advisory Committee, comprising one representative from each of the federal, state and territory health departments, and an Independent Advisory Council which includes healthcare provider, consumer and other sector stakeholder representatives, although observers have previously noted the operator is not obliged to heed any advice from either source.

When the PCEHR system commences operation, more than 500,000 health providers working across public and private healthcare organisations nationwide will have access to personal health information about their patients via a centralised record repository and indexing system.

Patients and providers will have to opt-in to this voluntary system, and consent arrangements will allow patients to control which providers can access personal health records.

But every Australian listed on the Medicare and Veterans Affairs databases has already been assigned a unique, 16-digit Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) through the identity and records matching service to be operated by Medicare, while providers have been issued Healthcare Provider Identifiers through their professional registration bodies.

The addendum also advises that healthcare organisations will have to agree to certain conditions around intellectual property rights, external auditing and access to information, to gain registration with the PCEHR system.

“This will require additional system functionality to maintain registration details and a process to support registration,” it notes.