Published by Computachem Services

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Alstonville. 2477
NSW Australia

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Editor's Note: The following information has been passed on from the desk of Patrick Gallagher, who is deeply interested in most aspects of Health Information Technology. The information has been supplied from the ICTeHealth Project, and is shared with readers to illustrate the diversity of IT activity currently evolving within the health sector, also to raise the profile of initiatives that ultimately may impact upon your workplace.
There is also a growing concern that some developments associated with the Better Medication Management System may eventually prove too expensive and impractical.
This can only result from poor advice and communication.
While you have to fail sometimes, in order to succeed, let us all endeavour to do so with minimal cost. The information that follows is, therefore, timely.

In almost all organisations of any size information systems have grown as 'silos' separate from one another. The introduction of 'Enterprise Resource Planning' (ERP) systems over the last decade has made great strides in breaking open and connecting the internal silos of corporate information - financial, HR and their associates such as payroll, project management, production control, material management, etc. The focus now is on the information systems that directly affect 'the business', most notably transactional e-commerce and other information flows that affect customer service and enhance operational efficiency.

ICTeHealth Project:

The project will capture and analyse information about key information flows within selected hospitals. Primarily describing the flow of data carried in the 'pipes and plumbing' of disparate ICT data capture, storage and retrieval systems. The initial focus is on 10 disparate public hospitals in NSW to give a reasonable snap shot of what the national scene may look like. This is a step towards benchmarking within Australia and globally.

The project will study the information flows from patient admission to discharge from wards including theatres, pharmacy, pathology, radiology and procurement departments. It will capture the details of the current information flows by employing a health professional to document the current practices in each hospital using a standard questionnaire. This information will then be loaded into a proprietary analytical software application that maps the information flows and presents the results as a graphical display.

The display highlights the breakpoints of the flows in the 'pipes and plumbing' - where information is being manually re-entered or is incompatible, either through being incomplete or suffering from syntactic or semantic mismatch. As such the display is easily understood by all the various non-IT information users and facilitates their understanding of the problems they suffer and necessary changes to solve them. This is the first step in managing the necessary changes.

Once the breakpoints have been identified then remedial action can be initiated. It's likely that the first stage of this will be to harmonise the names and definitions, both syntactic and semantic, of the information elements being used by the different users and systems. This will tie in with standardisation initiatives such as the adoption of HL7 and XML. Once this is done then specific projects can implement improved automatic information flows that ensure unambiguous information is entered only once and is reaching all the people and systems that need it - delivered in a reliable, timely, safe, accurate and useful manner.

This will not only assist individual hospitals, government or private, their management teams and clinical and supply partners, it will ultimately assist the DoHA and the HIC in implementing the planned BMMS and Healthconnect national programs

Ultimately, the resolution of the data interoperability problems within the hospital systems will facilitate the development and growth of broadband commercial services in the healthcare area. The Consortium believes that this will lead to the further development of ICT related products and services in Australia to underpin this potential. Moreover, given the global nature of these problems, Australian-based solutions will open up opportunities for marketing this expertise to healthcare providers in other countries - to this extent New Zealand hospitals have already expressed interest in the project outcomes.

ICTeHealth Information

The responsibility for the project, its funding and outcomes lies with the Project Consortium Committee. The project is primarily funded, through one of the Consortium members, the Australian Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers Association (AEEMA), by the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) and the NSW Department of Information Technology Management (DITM).

The other consortium members are

· Australian Information Industries Association (AIIA)
· Department of Information Technology Management, NSW (DITM)
· Netmap Analytics Pty Ltd

The Consortium Committee is also responsible for the appointment of a project manager and a project facilitator. AEEMA and AIIA are jointly repsonsible for providing administrative and public relations support to the project.

The management of the project is directed by a Steering Committee whose members include member representative from AEEMA and AIIA, NetMap (the analytical software contributor), CSIRO and the Department of Health, NSW.

The project has a Facilitation and Clinical Project Team who will work with the hospital staff to capture the information. They will liaise with NetMap to process the information and prepare the outcomes to be considered by the Steering Committee and then the Consortium before publication of results.

The Chair is Angus M Robinson, Chief Executive of AEEMA, telephone 02 6 247 4655, arobinson@aeema.asn.au

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