Shared Digital Health Record project faces delay
Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand has announced a delay in launching the Shared Digital Health Record system.
Initially set for a June completion, the project’s first phase of implementation will now take up to December to finish.
The new deadline is “more realistic,” the organisation said in a statement, as Health NZ Digital Services still has more work cut out. These include confirming privacy and security requirements, which also involves advising patients about data collection; working with primary care providers who opt in to collect and share read-only data from their practice management systems; onboarding more providers and shared EHR systems to the SDHR APIs; and putting up the SDHR APIs to the Health NZ Digital Services Hub.
This revised timeline, however, will not affect the roll out of the 24/7 digital health service, Te Whatu Ora maintained. The new telehealth service is set to roll out next month, July.
GP booking capability coming to NZ’s Healthline
New Zealand’s free over-the-phone health advice service, Healthline, will soon be able to help book callers an appointment with a general practitioner.
Whakarongorau Aotearoa, which operates the 24/7 service, has collaborated with Valentia Technologies to develop a cloud-based platform that connects Healthline with different healthcare providers.
This allows its nurses and paramedics to book appointments for callers, who have been advised to see a GP. They will also have real-time access to GP availability across the country.
It is said that a third of Healthline callers are referred to a GP or another health service. “Initially, this will be a telehealth appointment and soon after, in-person appointments,” said Whakarongorau.
The GP booking capability will be introduced next month, July.
DHCRC to pilot SMART on FHIR app for aged care
Australian government-funded Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre will be piloting an aged care application that adopts the SMART on FHIR interoperability and data exchange framework.
It is seeking vendors and aged care or primary care providers to join the pilot, which aims to demonstrate the feasibility of such a digital solution for “standardising the functional assessment of older Australians and generating evidence-based quality indicators.”
Sydney project developing multilingual chatbot for ED triage
A new doctor-led project in western Sydney will develop an AI-powered multilingual chatbot for emergency department triage.
The National Health and Medical Research Council-funded project aims to help ED staff, especially in multiculturally diverse communities, overcome language barriers to make more accurate triage assessments on the spot. More than half of southwestern Sydney’s population, it is noted, speaks different languages other than English.
“The idea is that this chatbot will be listening in at the registration point on a computer in an ED and will be able to interpret a patient’s description of their symptoms in real time, allowing triage staff to more quickly and accurately assess the severity of a patient’s condition,” explained the project lead, Dr Padmanesan Narasimhan, an emergency doctor and an academic researcher affiliated with University of New South Wales.
