Partners in E-Health

Australian Aging Agenda has reported that the National E-health Transition Authority (NEHTA) of Australia is calling for aged care software vendors and industry representatives to join a panel and work together on the transition to personally controlled eHealth records.

According to the publication, NEHTA said financial assistance would be provided to successful panelists to help them upgrade software products to the right specifications, and that vendors would need to have developed working solutions by June 2012.

Rod Young, CEO of the Aged Care Association Australia (ACAA), told Australian Aging Agenda that the ACAA welcomes the promise of funding to help software vendors tasked with the job of becoming enabled to meet the NEHTA standards. He added that the ACAA will be supported through a separate contract with the Department of Health and Ageing to work with clients of those vendors to advise them about the benefits of their software becoming compliant with the NEHTA standards.

Suri Ramanathan, chairman of the Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council (ACIITC), told Australian Aging Agenda that the council has been working closely with aged care IT vendors, providers and the government to ensure the industry is supported to maximize the benefits that can be achieved from the deployment of quality IT systems.

"The ACIITC partners will work closely with government to ensure the lessons learned from the project are made available to the rest of the industry to further support IT take up and innovative IT deployments that support business process re-design to maximize the benefits for staff and clients," he said.

Meanwhile, Rob Hankins, acting CEO of Aged and Community Services Australia (ACSA), said "aged care will face unprecedented demand for workers over the next 30 years. Without the maximum integration of information technologies in the care environment, we will struggle to attract and retain the necessary staff with the appropriate skills to achieve quality outcomes for our clients and residents."

The Australian government estimates that the eHealth records system's medications management capability could potentially save up to 5,000 lives annually and cut more than 2 million primary care and outpatient visits, 500,000 emergency department visits and 310,000 hospital admissions every year.

Source: Australian Ageing Agenda