NSW Health Record Hold Up

February 13, 2006: The NSW department of health has reportedly run in to trouble rolling out its new online health record system Healthelink.

The project has reportedly been held up by a messaging language called Health Level-7 (HL7) that extracts the data from patient records and prepares it for transfer via the Internet.

The system has been in development for over a year now. Originally due to be launched in November 2005, it is been pushed back to a March 2006 launch apparently due to HL7’s difficulties extracting data from the mix of old and new records in the system, and compatibility with the variety of patient administration software used throughout the region.

Along with the data extraction issues, there is some concern over doctors having to spend time updating the electronic health record (HER) system when they could be treating patients. However, in an interview with IDM, NSW Health says this is not the case as the records are updated on the fly from a range of sources and does not require any extra data entry.

“The EHR is entirely passive. It gives doctors a view of information that has been entered elsewhere. It gives doctors access, they don’t have to enter data.” says Joanna Kelly, Director - Portfolio Management, Strategic Information Management branch, NSW Health. “If a clinician in community health is seeing a patient in their own office, it triggers an automatic update from their own report.”

Kelly adds the system provides a “summary of information from the emergency department system, the diagnostic health system, basically systems that are already being used in hospitals, and presents that in an easy to use record that can be accessed from wherever they are.”

The system delivers information to doctors and patients via the Internet and is intended to be a brief record to aid in diagnosis and treatment.

Kelly says that the data stored covers “Geographic information, Information about allergies, a short family history, problem lists, immunisation dates, what vaccinations they may have had and any diagnostic procedures you may have had.”

The system is believed to be the first broad patient information database of its kind in Australia. NSW Health says that national health records standards are currently emerging, so there is a possibility that the system could be implemented nationally, provided the NSW trial is successful.

Keep an eye on IDM.net.au for EHR updates over the coming weeks.

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