eHealth

Details regarding the 2012 National eHealth Roadshow will be available shortly, please keep an eye on our website and your email inbox over the coming weeks.

What is eHealth and why do we need it?

eHealth aims to introduce electronic services to improve upon some paper-based systems. With the right protections in place, the electronic management of health information has the potential to transform the way we do things now, by improving the quality and safety of our healthcare system.

Currently, practitioners exchange clinical information on pieces of paper through the mail or the patient's hands and then there is the cumbersome task of trying to decipher the hand-written information. These manual procedures of creating and/or transmitting patient information between points of patient care introduce inefficiencies and opportunities for errors in the continuum of care.

The medical software industry in Australia is quite fragmented and this results in systems not being able to communicate with each other. The Australian Government is supporting the introduction of a national eHealth system which will provide consistent and enhanced communication between providers, resulting in greater operational efficiency and improved patient safety.

The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) has been established to accelerate the adoption of eHealth by building the foundations or 'building blocks' for a national eHealth infrastructure. This will facilitate improvements in patient identification, the secure electronic transmission of clinical documents between healthcare practitioners and consistent medical terminology.

The following pages will support you, as a Practice Manager, on the eHealth Journey:

The Healthcare Identifier (HI) Service

The first building block in a functional eHealth system is the ability to identify everyone in a single healthcare transaction. The Federal, state and territory governments have developed a national Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service which will uniquely identify healthcare providers and individuals. Click Here for more information.

Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record

An eHealth record provides practices with a summary of a patient's health information and their interactions with other healthcare organisations, whenever and wherever it is needed. Healthcare organisations will be able to access a patient's eHealth record from 1 July 2012. Click Here for more informaiton

What You Can Do Now

Click Here to discover what you can do now to get eHealth ready.

Links & Other Resources

Click Here for a comprehensive list of useful links and documents that can assist you on your eHealth journey.

For any eHealth enquiries please contact:

AAPM eHealth Marketing Officer, Hugh Miller

Phone: (03) 9095 8714 or Email: hmiller@aapm.org.au