The Australian Digital Health Agency has officially launched its national health information exchange program with the release of its strategy, architecture, and roadmap.
The program, according to the agency that leads Australia’s digital transformation in healthcare, aims to improve national digital health interoperability over the next five years.
“Our goal is to establish national capabilities and standards to facilitate health information sharing across existing and future systems,” said ADHA CEO Amanda Cattermole in a media release.
The national program, dubbed Health Connect Australia, has identified four strategic goals, including:
improving access to health information for the right people at the right time;
enabling Australians to control their healthcare journeys;
enhancing national digital health infrastructure and tools to support healthcare; and
ensuring information is secure, high-quality, and addresses privacy concerns.
Health Connect Australia’s three-layered architecture approach describes a federated model to allow interconnected health IT systems to function in a unified manner, a common technology framework to support multiple legislative and policy models, and interoperability patterns.
Based on its roadmap, the national HIE program will be rolled out in four phases:
a foundational phase, during which a national directory of providers and service information will be established;
a sharing phase, during which secure communication between providers will be enabled and consumer access to health documents will be improved;
a discovery phase, during which a record discovery service to locate and access healthcare information will be developed; and
an enhancement phase, during which value-added services, such as digital baby books and data sharing from medical wearables, will be introduced.
WHY IT MATTERS
ADHA emphasised that the national HIE program will improve the relationship between Australians and their healthcare providers.
“The frustration for consumers having to constantly retell their story and clinicians trying to find information, such as pathology and diagnostic imaging results, is real, and Health Connect Australia will ensure that a person’s health information moves with them though the system, enabling seamless care,” exp chief clinical adviser Dr Amandeep Hansra.
THE LARGER CONTEXT
Meanwhile, key to Health Connect Australia’s implementation is increasing the adoption of open national and international digital health standards. ADHA chief digital officer Peter O’Halloran said these new, updated standards will be “essential to enable health information to be accurately generated, shared and interpreted across systems using consistent data and terminology frameworks.”
The HIE program’s technical interfaces and data payloads will be based on open and widely adopted standards, particularly FHIR. In 2022, ADHA partnered with HL7 Australia to enable the consistent adoption of FHIR across the country. A year later, a FHIR accelerator program called Sparked was established.
The ADHA has also been developing the AU Core Framework for Interoperability, which will define API specifications, specifically how requests and responses are structured and transmitted between systems.
The agency is also working with CSIRO to deliver a new terminology service and capability through the National Clinical Terminology Service.
Health Connect Australia aligns with the Digital Health Blueprint 2023-2033, the recently redefined National Digital Health Strategy, and the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan.
One of the four target outcomes of Australia’s ten-year digital health blueprint is having data and information “shared and reused securely to deliver a sustainable learning health system.” The blueprint’s accompanying action plan includes supporting preliminary work to develop a “national legislative framework on health information sharing in states and territories.”
“Efforts are also underway to develop robust legislative and policy settings to support the seamless exchange of health information across jurisdictions,” shared ADHA’s O’Halloran.
