Health identifier still privacy minefield

Health ministers from around the country said yesterday that more consultation on privacy protections was necessary before any implementation of national individual health identification records could proceed.

The National E-health Transition Authority has received a mandate from the Council of Australian Governments to develop an individual health identifier for patients and providers with Medicare.

The identifiers will ease the flow of patient information throughout the health system, reducing the need to take histories twice, and helping health professionals gain a better overall view of patients' health.

Although there is agreement that such an identifier needs to be developed, there are privacy issues about the access to the information which need to be tackled. Legislation will also have to be passed before identifiers can become a reality.

At a conference of Australian health ministers held yesterday, the ministers discussed the individual health identifiers, saying that it was "essential" that privacy arrangements meet community expectations, balancing the need to protect personal details with the ability to achieve healthcare benefits through sharing of information.

Consultations were underway on the recommendations contained in the Australian Law Reform Commission's review on Australian privacy laws tabled last year and further consultations were planned to build on review stakeholder feedback which would be an opportunity to canvass e-health issues, according to the communique from the meeting.

A report of the findings from the consultations will be provided to COAG by the middle of this year.

Yet any move made to form a legislative framework for identifiers would need to progress swiftly if it is to come together at the same time as federal health department secretary Jane Halton has said the identifier will be ready. She said last week during a Senate Estimates Committee hearing that many underlying components for e-health, including the unique health identifier, would be delivered by the end of the year.

Halton assured Senator Boyce that "quite a bit of progress" had been happening in e-health, such as NEHTA receiving $218 million additional funding from COAG, and the appointment of NEHTA's new CEO Peter Fleming. Fleming recently called 2009 the authority's "year of delivery", with pilots planned to go ahead in the realm of discharge summaries and medication management.

Fleming himself had said that the non-technical issues — privacy issues, work issues, overarching consumer and government requirements and legislative changes — were the biggest hurdle to the unique identifier.