The Northern Territory department of Health and Families has awarded DCA the tender to provide a territory-wide infrastructure to support secure exchange of health records based on the NEHTA Secure Message Delivery (SMD) specification.

The infrastructure will enable existing software products residing in hospital, community health and aboriginal medical centres to send and receive secure messages amongst each other using a common protocol. The project is a collaboration between DCA, NTDHF, NEHTA, and the major existing software vendors Ascribe and Communicare.

DCA's Connectingcare product will facilitate exchange of messages to and from remote locations, and the Human Services Directory (HSD) will provide a common directory of services and providers. As part of the project, DCAwill develop a "plug in" component to enable vendors to link into the network using NEHTA standards.

"We are pleased to be part of a project that promotes interoperability between software solutions in health", said Peter Young, DCA general manager of health and community services, "the Northern Territory has a long history of health IT innovation and we look forward to working in partnership with them."