The Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA) has expressed concern about the lack of health information management in plans to implement recommendations of a report into the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system.

In a letter to Department of Health regarding its current round of consultations on the Review’s implementation, HIMAA’s CEO, Mr Richard Lawrance, commented that if the PCEHR was not functional as a health information management system, its impact upon the quality of care improvements expected of eHealth and in curtailing spiralling health care costs to the community will be severely impaired.

“The PCEHR Review report mentions ‘information’ 235 times,” Mr Lawrance observed. “It is most commonly qualified as ‘clinical’, next as ‘health’. ‘Health information professionals’ are mentioned just once in appendices, and ‘health’, ‘information’ and ‘management’ do not occur together at all; not even in the name of the Health Information Management Association of Australia, which is omitted from the list of 86 other contributors to the Review.”

Mr Lawrance was expressing concern that the Review report was being taken ‘as read’, and consultations focussed on the practicalities of implementation of its 38 recommendations.

“HIMAA is largely supportive of the recommendations, but collectively they fail to address the need for a longer term and systemic plan for the management of the volume of information the PCEHR will store over time, such that the relevant information is actually accessible to point of care clinical decision making, both to clinicians and their patients,” Mr Lawrance said.

“The PCEHR also needs an adequate classification system that renders it meaningful for population health management and research, and the application of its data as information for funders.”

Mr Lawrance said that the absence of health information management as a central organising concept is all the more worrying in that it is also missing from the recent Health Information Workforce (HIW) Report from Health Workforce Australia.

“The HIW report places a more informatics-focused Chief Information Officer as the ICT coordinator of a range of clinically-oriented CIOs - Nursing, Medical, Clinical,” Mr Lawrance said. “Information management expertise is completely absent from the report’s future configuration of health information at the executive level.”

“It would be disturbing if the exclusion of health information management from eHealth development represents a trend in government thinking.”