Australian Digital Health Agency launches Health Connect Australia

To improve access to health information between healthcare participants, the Australian Digital Health Agency has launched Health Connect Australia and released the Health Connect Australia Strategy, Architecture and Roadmap. “Our goal is to establish national capabilities and standards to facilitate health information sharing across existing and future systems,” Australian Digital Health Agency CEO Amanda Cattermole PSM said. “This initiative is not a singular product but rather a collection of capabilities designed to transform and better connect the healthcare ecosystem.”

Cattermole adding: “Health Connect Australia builds on the successes of My Health Record and other Agency products and services, laying the groundwork for the future of healthcare in Australia.” An improvement of access to health information, for the right people at the right time; Australians being enabled to control their healthcare journeys; national digital health infrastructure and tools enhancement to support health care; and ensuring that information is secure, high quality and addresses privacy concerns, are among the strategic goals of Health Connect Australia.

“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,” Australian Digital Health Agency Chief Clinical Adviser (Medicine) Dr Amandeep Hansra said. “It will enable all parts of the health system to invest in solutions that work together, improving care, reducing duplication and giving Australians more control over their health information.”

At the core of the effective implementation of Health Connect Australia is, according to Australian Digital Health Agency Chief Digital Officer Peter O’Halloran, increasing the adoption of open national and international digital health standards. “With evolving technology and an ever-changing healthcare system, new and updated digital health standards are essential to enable health information to be accurately generated, shared and interpreted across systems using consistent data and terminology frameworks,” O’Halloran said. “Efforts are also underway to develop robust legislative and policy settings to support the seamless exchange of health information across jurisdictions.”

Timeline

The rollout of Health Connect Australia will occur in four phases: foundations, sharing, discovery and enhancement. The first, foundations phase involves the establishment of a national directory — for seamless access to provider and service information; in the second, sharing phase, secure communication of health information between providers will be enabled, and consumer access to health documents improved; in the third, discovery phase, to locate and access healthcare information, a record discovery service will be developed; and then in the fourth, enhancement phase, value-added services, such as digital baby books and data sharing from medical wearables, will be introduced.

More information is available here, via the Health Connect Australia Strategy, Architecture and Roadmap website.

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