In the past seven months, only five vendors have passed the requirements for their software to be connected to the live e-health production platform. There are more than 250 software vendors who need their 300-400 products certified for the PCEHR.
The PCEHR is intended to be a secure electronic summary of people's medical history that is stored and shared in a "network of connected systems".
Software used by hospitals, GPs, allied health professionals, dentists and radiologists is often custom-made and needs to be compliant with the web-based national PCEHR system.
The longer it takes to test the systems, the longer it will take to roll out the software to hospitals, GPs and others who need to use it.
Sources close to the e-health project told The Australian the test environment had been going offline two to three times a week. This included planned and unplanned outages. The Department of Health and Ageing declined to comment on the outage frequency.
However, a spokeswoman said: "Obviously the test environment exists so things can be trialled before going live in the main system. That's the normal way IT systems like this operate the world over."
As recently as last Tuesday, the test system was offline for nine hours, but the spokeswoman said the test environment was stable.
She declined to provide reasons for unplanned outages.
The test environment had been available to software vendors since April this year, she said, adding that unavailability of the test environment had no impact on the live system. "Software vendors are not permitted to connect to the (live) production system without passing testing in the software vendor test environment," the spokeswoman said. "The test environment has absolutely no impact on the access to or functionality of the main system -- that is, patient and doctor use of the main system is not affected at all.
She declined to say how many times the test platform had been offline since it became available.
Meanwhile, 19,617 people had registered for an e-health record, the spokeswoman said.
More than 17,000 people had registered online, and the rest had done so by phone, in writing or in person at Medicare offices.
She declined to reveal how many consumers were using the system on a daily basis, but said it was accessed 306 times on average every day.
The opt-in PCEHR system should allow people to decide which healthcare organisations can see and edit their record, and view a log of those who have accessed the record or added information to it.
One of the biggest benefits of the system is that consumers can share their health information with healthcare professionals from a central electronic hub.
As of last Thursday there were 16 shared health summaries and one discharge summary uploaded into the PCEHR, the spokeswoman confirmed. The shared health summary was a key feature of the PCEHR, Australian Medical Association president Steve Hambleton said previously.
"The activity that is required to create and maintain a shared health summary is a new clinical service for doctors that will need to be factored into current clinical practice," Dr Hambleton said.
"The work involved in creating an event summary will also have to be factored into clinical practice.
"These activities are clinically relevant services that will require extra work for the doctors who choose to provide them."
More than $1 billion has been spent on the national e-health infrastructure, including $777 million from the federal government for specific PCEHR-related activities since July 2010.
It is unclear when the PCEHR project will be completed.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Fran Foo
Quelle/Source: Australian, 27.11.2012
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