[LINK] itNews: 'Government tackles telehealth standards'

[Roger Clarke]

[It's just extraordinary that us mug taxpayers funded a massive 
HealthConnect program in the Dept of Health for years, and continue 
to fund its successor, NEHTA, and *still* they've abjectly failed 
their primary responsibility - to tackle inter-operability issues.

[From this article, it even looks as if NEHTA may have continued to 
be so useless that DoHA has had to take back the responsibility.

[Can you say anything positive Roger?  Well yes:

[I'd have been very happy if there was a document, at about version 5 
by now, that identified standards and what they depended on and were 
suitable for, and noted the challenges they presented to tele-health; 
and if NEHTA was now saying that, with ADSL2+ available in many 
[urban] areas, and the NBN set to quickly up the ante, it's now time 
to do a major revision and extension to the document.]


Government tackles telehealth standards
Liz Tay
itNews
Aug 8, 2011 2:22 PM
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/265968,government-tackles-telehealth-standards.aspx

Technical recommendations on the way.

The Federal Government and its e-health transition authority will 
soon issue a draft position paper outlining technical standards for 
those looking to participate in its new telehealth rebates scheme.

The Government introduced the $620 million scheme on 1 July in a bid 
to improve Australians' access to medical specialists from rural, 
regional and outer metropolitan areas.

Medical professionals lodged more than 140 claims in the scheme's 
first month, despite having no official clinical standards and 
limited technical guidance so far.

The Department of Health and Ageing planned to issue a draft position 
paper around technical standards to the IT industry and healthcare 
provider associations in "coming weeks".

"Telehealth is millions and millions of different things," the 
department's chief information and knowledge officer Paul Madden told 
the Health Informatics Conference last week.

"We kicked off some work a couple of weeks ago to develop a position 
paper to describe the standards we would use and identify any gaps 
[in existing standards].

"Preliminary work is complete, and the overall conclusion is that 
there are enough standards at the moment to enable the use of 
telehealth."

...

-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University