Health identifer not legal till next year
The legislation changes required for the national use of an individual health identifier won't likely be completed until mid next year, and that's only if the federal election doesn't become a hurdle, according to National E-health Transition Authority (NEHTA) CEO Peter Fleming.
Peter Fleming(Credit: NEHTA)
"I think realistically by the middle of next year we should have the legislation in place to support this. Pragmatically I understand next year is probably going to be an election year and there's a little bit of difficulty around that. So it's something that we need to monitor very carefully," Fleming said, speaking at the IIR National Telemedicine Summit in Sydney today.
The chief executive has touted this year as the "year of delivery" talking about bringing significant pilots on line in the fields of discharge referral and medication management, and having the technical requirements for an individual health identifier up and running.
There has also been work carried out on how to securely move information from A to B.
However, in order for any systems to be populated with personal data, there needs to be consultation on privacy and information sharing issues.
At a recent conference of Australian health ministers, the ministers said 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 and agreed that further consultations were required before an individual health identifier could get off the ground.
Consultations are underway on the recommendations contained in the Australian Law Reform Commission's review on Australian privacy laws tabled last year. A report of the findings will be provided to COAG by the middle of this year.
A group called the NHIRF (National Health Information Regulatory Framework), of which NEHTA is a member, is also currently looking into the legislative changes which will be required.
Yet the work has been moving slowly; NEHTA has already suffered a slight setback, according to Fleming.
"One of the problems we've had in NEHTA is our documentation has been so complex. The groups that have been working on the legislative requirements have found it a bit difficult to understand what we're doing, what's required. So with them we've taken quite a number of steps back over the last couple of months to provide documentation for them that's meaningful in the way we frame the legislative framework."
Despite the slow movement of legislation changes, NEHTA is keeping its plans for pilots on a "reasonable scale" and has been talking to various bodies to see what parts of the identifier can be implemented to support the pilots. "So it might be through a series of consent agreements, it could be through some kind of ministerial decree," Fleming said.