Features
Action in Digital Health and Clinical Radiology The College is finalising a white paper on digital health and clinical radiology. This sets out key steps in the application of digital health to clinical radiology to improve the workflow for radiology practices, and the outcomes for patients. Already, there has been action on some of the key proposed steps, building on earlier work by the College and others. At the request of the Federal government, the College and the Australian Diagnostic Imaging Association (ADIA) have submitted a report on the terminologies used for the identification of radiological procedures, with recommendations on how to adopt a standardised “Radiology Referral Set” with minimum disruption to existing systems. The Federal Budget handed down in May 2021 included provision of $7.2 million for work on electronic referrals in radiology. This will build on earlier work by the College on the information content required in referrals, and on the College’s position paper “Building eReferral: Safety and Patient Choice Position Statement.” The original version of the position paper was prepared in 2018, and this is currently being reviewed in the light of recent experience (especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the widespread adoption of ‘telehealth’ measures). There will continue to be a strong emphasis on the importance of patient choice of provider. It will also be important to ensure that this great opportunity to improve the quality of referral information is not lost by merely replicating existing paperbased processes. The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) has been working with the providers of secure messaging in health care to define standards and profiles that will allow secure messaging to be
widely available in health care, with seamless access to the clients of other providers, rather than access limited to each provider’s silo. Secure messaging will play a key role in safeguarding patient privacy and confidentiality as digital data exchange becomes ubiquitous, avoiding the potential hazards of email and social media. The Agency has been trialling prototype secure messaging solutions with several of the leading messaging suppliers this year. Much consideration has been given to strategies for improving access to images from previous studies. The best solutions here will build on work from other key steps in the white paper (the Radiology Referral Set and eReferral), and will also be influenced by the infrastructure put in place by State jurisdictions. That said, the white paper recognises that the steps need to be worked on concurrently as much as possible, both to optimise the interplay between them, and to minimise delays.
Radiology Referral Set: a Key Tool for our Digital Future New digital technologies and applications are in the process of revolutionising many fields of activity, including health care and, specifically, radiology. In planning and preparing for this, the College has identified some key tools that will be needed to help improve our processes and outcomes.
Interoperability A plethora of new applications in health are being launched by many different groups, and it is critical that the data from one application can be read and treated appropriately by the next application in the chain. This requires the systems and applications to be not just interoperable (where the output from one application can be read and used by another), but semantically interoperable (where each system attributes the same “meaning” to a
Volume 17 No 4 | September 2021
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