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COAG commits to health IDs in 2010

The Council of Australian Governments yesterday confirmed the goal of introducing individual healthcare identifiers within the next year and vowed to put draft legislation on the table for consultation.
Written by Suzanne Tindal, Contributor

The Council of Australian Governments yesterday confirmed the goal of introducing individual healthcare identifiers within the next year and vowed to put draft legislation on the table for consultation.

"Delivering a safe, patient-centred e-health system is one step closer today, with COAG affirming its commitment to the introduction in 2010 of national healthcare identifier numbers," the council's communiqué for yesterday's meeting said.

In order for each Australian to receive a unique number to facilitate the movement of health information between different providers, new legislation is required. The hope is to have that legislation passed next year. The system creating the identifiers has already been developed by the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) and Medicare, an office version of the system was set to be tested this month.

There have been privacy concerns about the introduction of the identifiers, with people worried about the easy access they would facilitate to personal information. A round of consultations was held in July and August on the matter which lead to further work on privacy. The council also considered the feedback from that round of consultations in the meeting yesterday.

The community will now have another chance to have its say on privacy implications, as the council decided yesterday to also release draft legislation for consultation.

In addition, the council formed a national partnership for e-health, which set out objectives and scope for the healthcare identifiers as well as governance, legislative, administrative and financial arrangements.

However, the overall framework for e-health records remains unfunded. NEHTA's business case for the combination of the health identifiers into personally owned individual electronic health records was again not considered by COAG. NEHTA has been trying to get its business case considered since October last year.

Estimates say that the spend needs to be between $1.2 billion to $1.9 million to create a functioning e-health system.

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