The Australian Government has announced nine Second Wave sites for the implementation of its $467 million national Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) project.

 

The nine sites will receive Commonwealth funding of up to $55 million.  They will be operated by:

  • Medibank Private (nationwide) to implement a consumer-oriented portal, which integrates consumer entered information into a ‘Health Book’. The ‘Health Book’ will be initially made available to all Medibank Private customers and their healthcare providers enrolled in Medibank’s Health Management and Chronic Disease Management programs;

  • FRED IT MedView Project (nationwide, with a focus on Geelong, Vic) - will demonstrate the ability for up to 2 million individuals and their healthcare providers to access their prescribing and dispensing history via a medicines repository using national electronic prescription and other standards. The project will deploy MedView to all pharmacies and GPs in the Geelong region and to a further 10% of this target market nationally. The project will bring together a grouping of private sector eHealth vendors including FRED, eRx, Best Practice, Zedmed, iCare, Microsoft and SIMPL.

  • Brisbane South General Practice Division – aimed at enrolling 25,000 people in the Brisbane and Ipswich region, with a focus on individuals with disabilities and their carers, war veterans and war widows, and children commencing school. The project will bring two Division’s of General Practice onboard, Brisbane South and Ipswich and West Moreton, and public and private hospitals, allied health and GP’s. It will leverage wave 1 infrastructure.

  • Mater Misericordiae Health Services Brisbane, focusing on mothers and newborns, the project involves three GP Divisions (South East Alliance, Brisbane South and the South East Primary HealthCare network) and local specialist obstetricians. The project will leverage wave 1 infrastructure.

  • St Vincent’s and Mater Health Sydney - will establish a lead eHealth site based around St Vincent’s and Mater Health Sydney, in conjunction with partnering Divisions of General Practice, participating specialists and software vendors including Smart Health, Precedence, HCN and Best Practice. The project has a population reach of 1 million individuals attending the St Vincent’s campus and aims to improve clinical communication across the project’s footprint through the delivery of key PCEHR components.

  • Greater Western Sydney e-Health Consortium (NSW Health) - will implement key building blocks for state-wide eHealth infrastructure that will allow NSW Health to connect to the PCEHR System when it becomes available. The initial focus will be on priority consumer groups in the Greater Western Sydney region. The project includes four GP Divisions (WentWest, Nepean, Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury-Hills) and will leverage previous technology investments. With a population reach of 1,750,000, the project will be able to expand to encompass ultimately the whole of NSW.

  • Northern Territory Department of Health and Families will deliver a lead eHealth site for Indigenous Australians living in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia,  leveraging the existing NT shared electronic health record and extending the existing service to all Northern Territory residents and Indigenous individuals in Western Australia and South Australia.

  • Calvary Health Care ACT - will support a cross-border population of approximately 800,000 individuals in the ACT and regional NSW by bringing together a major grouping of private sector eHealth vendors. The vendors involved include iSoft, HCN, HealthLink, Smart Health Solutions and Precedence HealthCare.

  • Cradle Coast, North-West Area Health Service Project, Tasmania - targets aged and palliative care patients and their families, palliative care medical specialists and clinical nurse consultants. The project will use off-the-shelf care planning software to share the advance care directives until the national PCEHR infrastructure is in place.

The nine second-wave sites will develop their plans by the end of May 2011. The first round of sites, currently being implemented, were awarded to

  • Hunter Urban Division of General Practice
  • GP Partners Ltd (Brisbane)
  • Melbourne East General Practice Ltd.

 

The e-health scheme is designed to centralize and integrate all existing medical patient information into a single digital database with an eye to streamline medical treatment using e-referrals, secure messaging and a medical imaging repository.

 

For more information, visit the YourHealth website  http://www.yourhealth.gov.au