Australia - OpenEHR: The World's Record need

in Australia 's "Pulse+IT magazine"  ( http://www.openehr.org/)
by Heather Leslie, Nov 2007

In a world where connectivity reigns, our health information is largely still caught up in silos and, in the main, is not shareable by clinicians.

Shared electronic health records ( SEHRs ) are increasingly needed to provide timely, comprehensive and coordinated healthcare. Over many years there have been ongoing and thorough attempts to achieve the sharing of health information in order to support the improvement of health outcomes, but this incremental approach, gradually building on previous experience, has not been wholly successful. Progress has been made; however despite enormous investment and resources, the solution has been more difficult than most ever anticipated. Healthcare provision does not seem to fit into the same kind of data sharing model that has been successful in other domains, such as banking or financial services.

In order to support interoperability of health information, SEHRs need clinical content to be standardised . This supports standardised communication of complex health information between systems and the opening of these vertical domain and organisational silos, allowing accurate and semantically computable health information flow. Inevitably the shared clinical content specifications begin to influence the information models within clinical applications. open EHR is an electronic health record architecture based on many years of research and development, and is designed to work in partnership with all vendor systems, organisations and providers to facilitate semantic interoperability of health information. It is a comprehensive and transformational solution, which applies to the capturing and sharing of information from the most complex and dynamic knowledge domain – health.

Why Are Health Records So Difficult?

The problem is twofold – firstly, the evolving clinical needs and requirements for a SEHR are difficult to pin down, and secondly the technical issues related to a SEHR solution.

Why are clinical requirements so difficult to capture and transform into an electronic health record (EHR)? Certainly no-one will argue that our experience of healthcare delivery is changing – hospital in the home projects; supported self-management; patient requests for access to GP and hospital clinical records; personal health records; service coordination; clinical care plans; preventive health priorities... The list goes on, mirroring the rapidly evolving change in clinical EHR requirements needed to support these new paradigms of healthcare delivery. These new ways of delivering care require a coordinated approach – healthcare providers need to collaborate efficiently in real time, which is not adequately supported by traditional methods, such as meetings and phone calls. We really need an interoperable and integrated patient record in which all healthcare providers can participate, within a framework providing governance, authorisation and security measures. (Read more...) 

Supercomputing Grids Close Ranks to Meet HIV Medical Challenge

Source:  DEISA Newsletter ( http://www.deisa.org )
Date: 17 December 2007

Two supercomputing networks have successfully joined forces in a distributed simulation of the effectiveness of drugs on mutant strains of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Although the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Application (DEISA) and the GridAustralia-Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) infrastructures use incompatible underlying platforms (UNICORE 5 and Globus Tool Kit, respectively), the researchers were able to spread the computing tasks over the two high performance computing (HPC) grids.

As HIV is highly mutable, it frequently becomes resistant to drugs that reduce patients' viral loads and bind and inhibit critical viral enzymes. As a result, patients will then have to change their drug regime. It is essential to select the right drug in order to provide the best possible treatment, as well as to prevent the development of further drug resistance.

The simulations run by DEISA and APAC are intended to help this process by testing the effectiveness of particular antiviral drugs against a number of mutant HIV strains. They analyse average interaction energies between anti-HIV drugs and the HIV protease strain, hoping to thus provide an accurate assessment of the drugs' effectiveness. A huge number of calculations is needed for this, and this is why the process necessitates the processing power of supercomputers. Researchers were sure that time-to-solution would be further reduced by employing several supercomputers in a grid and spreading the tasks over different grids at the same time.

This is the first time that a reliable, automated bidirectional data transfer between the European DEISA grid and the Australian APAC grid has been demonstrated.

Plesae read the DEISA PRESS RELEASE with more details on this issue  

e-Health and Telemedicine (eHT) Workshop
15-16 Nov 2007
University Club of Western Australia
Australia
Visit the Conference Site: : http://www.emedicine.com.au/Education.htm

Prescriptions in Australia Set to Go Electronic

Source:  iHealthBeat  (California Healthcare Foundation)   ( www.ihealthbeat.org/ ) (by Metilkovec, Melbourne Herald Sun ).
Date:  March 06, 2007

The Australian federal government last week introduced changes to legislation that would allow all physicians in the country to have access to an electronic prescription system to reduce medication errors, the Melbourne Herald Sun reports.

The government is creating a list of standards and accepting proposals from pharmacies and physician practices interested in adopting the system. Patients only will need to provide their Medicare details at any pharmacy to pick up their prescriptions.
"Under our system, electronic prescriptions will go to a central electronic mailbox, which can be accessed at any pharmacy," Kos Sclavos, president of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, said. The e-prescription system will mark the first time that the federal government can track the medications that physicians are prescribing, Sclavos said.

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia also has been collaborating with the federal government to ensure that the e-prescription system is secure.
The e-prescription data will not be stored on Australia's national identity cards, which will be issued to more than 16.5 million Australians in 2008, because of a lack of available memory space, Sclavos said. The focus of the system right now is centered on ensuring that physicians and pharmacists connect to broadband Internet, he said.
E-prescriptions could be available in two to three years, according to health experts, the Herald Sun reports.

Robots in Australian Childrens' Hospitals Aid Telemedicine

Source: California Healthcare Foundation (www.ihealthbeat.org)
Date: 2nd October 2006

The University of Queensland's Center for Online Health in Australia has developed robots that connect patients, physicians and other specialists through video teleconferencing, the "Brisbane Courier Mail" reports.
The mobility of the robots enables video-conferencing consultations among patients, resident physicians and specialists thousands of miles away. A video monitor and camera within the robots capture and send images between Brisbane and local Queensland hospitals, the Courier Mail reports.
Two of the robots are extensions of the telepediatric services in the children's wards of Gladstone Hospital and Mount Isa Hospital, and a third robot will be deployed at Brisbane's Royal Children's Hospital, the Courier Mail reports.
The robots were developed with funding from the mining company Xstrata via the Royal Children's Hospital Foundation (Condren, Brisbane Courier Mail, 9/30).Robot Facilitates Telemedicine in Canada (read more...)

Super Internet Designed by Australian: Consortium Receives $14 Million Seed Funding
(Source: Federal Telemedicine NEWS - Sept 2001)

The Australian Consortium is working on a new super fast Internet that will make changes in such areas as telehealth, and distance education.

The Consortium led by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) will establish a Center for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE). A grant of $14 million will be augmented by another $30 million contributed by the members of the CeNTIE bid.

One of the most needed applications that will be developed is in interactive surgical training and telepresence surgery using networked virtual environments. This work will be done in Perth (at IVEC) and at Sydney based on existing CSIRO work in this area.

For more information
email Terry.Percival@tip.csiro.au or go to http://www.csiro.au

New Faster Digital X-Ray System In Use in Australia
Date: 13.09.2001
Source: Federal Telemecine News

Green Lane Hospital in Australia performs over 100 chest x-rays per day. A new digital radiographic imaging system at Green Lane Hospital is the first of its kind in Australia, and can produce patient x-rays in 5 seconds with images ready for clinicians to view within 15 seconds.(more)

New Australian research network using dark fiber &wavelengths
(Source: CANARIE CA*net 3 / 28.05.2001)

AUSTRALIA PUSHES AHEAD WITH NATIONAL ADVANCED NETWORK PROJECTS

A national advanced network backbone and broadband wireless project in Australia received commitments for over AUS $37 million in government funding, plus another AUS $93 million in contributions from consortium members. The Building on IT Strengths (BITS) Advanced Networks Program will include the following projects:

• Centre for Networking Technologies for Information Economy (CeNTIE) (AUS $14 million) - a CSIRO-led consortium including Nortel Networks, Amcom Telecommunications, the UNSW, UTS and the WA Interactive Virtual Environments Centre (IVEC). CeNTIE will build metro optical networks in Sydney and Perth using newly-constructed or leased dark fiber. New and existing research and administrative LANs will be connected with 10 Gbps upgradeable links. The MANs will be connected by Amcom's DWDM long-haul
  network.
• GrangeNet (AUS $14 million) – backed by AARNet, the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), the CRC for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology, Cisco and PowerTel. GrangeNet is a high performance backbone based upon four main nodes in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, with 2.5 Gbps Packet over SDH (PoS) links utilizing dark fiber.
• mNet Australia (AUS $9 million) – supported by Adelaide University, Agile Pty Ltd, Dspace Pty Ltd, the Playford Centre, Telstra, the City of Adelaide and the University of South Australia. mNet intends to establish state of the art wireless LANs and leading-edge pre-commercial 3G mobile networks and to link them with fiber.

Each of these projects will receive grants funded from the partial sale of Telstra to establish next generation networks using leading-edge network technologies. http://www.dcita.gov.au/bits/

National Centre for Classification in Health (NCCH) 7th Biennial Conference in Sydney from April 1 - 3, 2001

The NCCH is the Australian centre of excellence in health classification theory and an expert centre in clinical coding systems.

The conference is a major component of the continuing education for clinical coders and health information managers around Australia. The conference attracts approximately 200-300 delegates from Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

The theme for this year's conference is 'the language of health' . The conference will focus on issues such as the emergence of the electronic health record, terminologies and vocabularies, data quality, health information and classification technologies, clinical coder workforce and education issues.

The conference will be valuable to those with an interest in clinical classification issues particularly the emerging area of terminologies, vocabularies and health informatics. The conference would be pertinent to those working in the healthcare industry including; clinical coders, health information managers, nosologists, data managers, casemix co-ordinators, clinicians, health service managers and planners, software vendors, health authority representatives, information technology professionals, academics and researchers from both the public and private sectors.