NEHTA sics lawyer on ex-staffers

Two former National E-Health Authority employees who are pushing a self-developed alternative to individual health identifiers have been threatened with legal action by the authority for what it claims is theft of its intellectual property.

...you appear to be claiming ownership of intellectual property of a government-funded entity and offering it back as a business opportunity...

NEHTA lawyer, Piper Alderman partner Tom Griffith

NEHTA's charge has been to bring Australia into the e-health era where every Australian has an electronic medical record. It has been working with Medicare on a number for each citizen which can be used to collate medical information.

Phillip Johnson and Peter West, who left the employment of the authority late last year, had been concerned about the privacy implications of such a number, which could make it easier for people to obtain personal medical information.

They worked together on a system called *DIAD, and put in two provisional patent filings, as well as registering web domains with the name. According to an information page on the system, instead of using a number, it uses a handle — like in social networking — controlled by the patient.

NEHTA's legal council has sent a legal letter to those men, which ZDNet.com.au has seen, claiming that they worked on this system while employed at NEHTA, and that under their contract the intellectual property therefore belongs to NEHTA.

The letter says that Johnson and West's behaviour — including sending messages from work to home email addresses with NEHTA documents and source code attached — suggested that they had used confidential NEHTA information to develop their idea. The authority said the patents were filed when West was still employed by the company.

According to the letter, Johnson wrote to NEHTA clinical leader Dr Mukesh Haikerwal, announcing the launch of *DIAD and spoke of "opportunities for NEHTA" which the authority assumed would come at a price.

"That you appear to be claiming ownership of intellectual property of a government-funded entity and offering it back as a business opportunity presumably designed to benefit you financially, is understandably a matter of grave concern to NEHTA," the letter said.

The authority also took exception to the fact that Johnson's company Envisioneering listed NEHTA as one of its clients, although the company had not completed any work for NEHTA.

NEHTA wanted written assurance that Johnson and West had not extracted confidential information, and if it had occurred, that the confidential information be returned in 10 days, with a written undertaking that they would not use the information again.

Johnson and West's legal advisor Lisa Honeychurch from Honeychurch Workplace Laywers and Consultant, replied in a letter. It claimed that NEHTA had made sweeping allegations without providing particulars on the evidence which showed that the men had used NEHTA's information to develop *DIAD. NEHTA should have been able to provide such details since it had information on *DIAD from when Johnson approached it, the legal advisor believed.

Honeychurch also asked, since NEHTA was a non-profit organisation, what its business was and what the "rival business" was supposed to be that Johnson and West had set up. She also pointed out that NEHTA's system was in the public domain.

If West and Johnson were trying to be underhanded, Honeychurch claimed, they wouldn't have been so silly as to contact NEHTA directly about the *DIAD concept.

To ensure that no confidential NEHTA documents had been retained amongst the publicly available NEHTA documents, Johnson and West had deleted all NEHTA documents from their systems, according to a draft of the letter.

Johnson had made an error by placing NEHTA's name on the client list for Envisioneering, Honeychurch said. That had been rectified.

However, Honeychurch said that Johnson and West would not give up the patents or domain names. She asked that NEHTA give details of the alleged misuse of confidential information or withdraw the allegations.

At the Council of Australian Governments meeting, the states reiterated their intention to provide an individual health identifier to every Australian. The legislation necessary to make the identifier a reality is currently in draft.

NEHTA declined to comment on the issue.