and practice management system throughout its operations. Its founders and owners, Peter Stratmann and Andrew Pascoe, sit on Zedmed’s board and the company is also affiliated with the Pathology One diagnostic service.
Provider IdentifierOrganisation (HPI-O) classification through the HI Service, but multi-site medical centre operators like Medical One must also apply for Network HPI-Os for each practice.
Its Geelong centre at Waurn Ponds has been working with the software vendor as it tests its interface to the PCEHR, Medical One’s general manager, Karen Perham, said.
“Users can view, upload and download documents, so basically that gives you full access to the PCEHR directly through Zedmed.“
She said one of the Geelong centre’s GPs, Bernard Shiu, had uploaded a shared health summary to a staff member’s PCEHR on October 17, and the group is now able to offer the service to patients. “A couple of patients have asked about the PCEHR but really not many people know enough about it,” she said. “There is a still a lot of training to do, and we are currently writing our policies and procedures on how to use the system.” Since then, Murray Verso of The Clinic Williamstown and Mark Magill of Park Street General Practice in Geelong have also begun uploading documents. Medical One is an interesting case study in how large medical groups will interact with the eHealth records system, if they so choose. Healthcare organisations must apply for a Seed Healthcare
Ms Perham herself is both the responsible officer (RO) for the participation of the organisation in the HI Service, and an organisation maintenance officer (OMO) responsible for maintaining the accuracy of the HPI-O. She said it was likely that as the new system takes shape, she will allocate the OMO role to one person at each centre. Medical One has gone through the process of obtaining PKIs for all of its centres through Medicare’s Health Professional Online Services (HPOS), including tokens for both clinicians and practice staff. On October 31 – the deadline set by NEHTA to the software vendors panel
to have full functionality integrated into their products – Zedmed announced that its compliant software, version 20, was in general release. All users of Zedmed can now install v20 and begin accessing the PCEHR to view clinical documents and upload shared health summaries. Ms Blakely said the software also currently supports the ETP requirement, with the ability to use either the eRx or the MediSecure prescription exchanges. It will also have full secure message delivery (SMD) standard capability shortly. “We are working with both Argus and HealthLink on SMD capability and my understanding is that they and Global Health are working together on a project to work interoperably,” she said. Zedmed’s general manager, Grant Williamson, said the company was “excited by Medical One’s upload and are proud to be a part of such a significant step towards Australia’s eHealth system. We are proud of our recent developments and are excited to provide users with the confidence they need to become eHealth compliant,” he said. For extensive coverage of the new ePIP requirements and the level of progress of the vendors, see pages 50 to 57 in this issue of Pulse+IT.
St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney hooks up to the PCEHR Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital has become the first hospital in Australia to connect to the PCEHR, and has achieved another first in uploading an electronic discharge summary to the system. St Vincent’s accessed the PCEHR of one of its patients, allowing the hospital to see a recent and up-to-date summary of his healthcare information uploaded by his GP, along with his recent Medicare history. The hospital was also able to transmit a full electronic discharge summary to the system, in what is a major breakthrough in eHealth in Australia. The discharge summary includes information such as diagnosis, diagnostic investigations, procedures performed, clinical interventions and a full list of prescribed medications upon discharge. The summary was delivered securely to the national system in an industryagreed, standardised format. St Vincent’s used Emerging Systems’ EHR clinical information system, known as deLacy, to connect to the PCEHR. Emerging Systems has been working closely with St Vincent’s in the Eastern Sydney Connect Wave 2 trial, helping to test the transmission of admission and discharge notifications and discharge summaries from St Vincent’s to local GPs. In September, well-known GP Ray Seidler uploaded his first shared health summary to a patient’s PCEHR, and has long heralded the importance of an electronic discharge summary to GPs. “Some patients forget to bring their letter to the GP and so much pertinent information gets lost,” he said. “Now we have a fail-safe method of information transfer. This makes the patient happy and produces rejoicing amongst us GPs who were previously left out of the loop.”
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