About Us
The National E-Health Transition Authority Limited (known as NEHTA) was established by the Australian, State and Territory governments to develop better ways of electronically collecting and securely exchanging health information.
NEHTA Chief Executive Officer
Peter Fleming was appointed Chief Executive in September 2008 to lead the development of Australia’s national e-health agenda. Mr Fleming comes to NEHTA following a successful tenure as the General Manager Technology, Business Integration, for National Australia Bank. He started his career at Coles-Myer before moving to Colonial Group for seven years and rising to chief information officer. At Colonial, Mr Fleming was involved in installing a new banking system for the State Bank of NSW. He then joined the Mayne Group Limited in 2002 as Chief Information Officer where he was responsible for information technology initiatives across the group, including the evaluation of emerging technologies to support Mayne’s businesses internationally. Mr Fleming has also previously worked as Chief Information Officer at Vodafone Australia and held other senior IT roles.
Electronic health information (or e-health) systems that can securely and efficiently exchange data can significantly improve how important clinical and administrative information is communicated between healthcare professionals. As a result, e-health systems have the potential to unlock substantially greater quality, safety and efficiency benefits.
In delivering this mission, NEHTA will support the Australian health system by:
- Improving the quality of healthcare services, by enabling authorised clinicians to access a patient's integrated healthcare information and history, directly sourced from clinical notes, test results and prescriptions using standardised clinical data formats and terminologies.
- Streamlining multi-disciplinary care management, enabling seamless handovers of care by ensuring efficient electronic referrals; authorised access to up-to-date clinical opinions and patient healthcare histories via shared patient health records; and fast, secure mechanisms for directly exchanging important notifications between healthcare providers.
- Improving clinical and administrative efficiency, by standardising certain types of healthcare information to be recorded in e-health systems; uniquely identifying patients, healthcare providers and medical products; and reforming the purchasing process for medical products.
- Maintaining high standards of patient privacy and information security.