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eHealth Architecture, Interoperability and Standards

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eHealth Architecture

NEHTA's Architectural endeavour follows three key paradigms:

• The first is the National eHealth Architecture (sector-wide), which provide both capability and solution views for eHealth in Australia.
  • The capability view leverages the eHealth Capability Reference Model, which is a business orientated model describing eHealth business capabilities and services, and supporting application and technology capabilities.  This model provides the mechanism for the eHealth community (vendors, public & private health organisation big and small, government and others) to better understand eHealth capability gaps and opportunities, thereby facilitating effective and efficient development and adoption. It also provides a discovery channel for those looking to leverage existing capability within the sector.
  • The Solution View provides the patterns for eHealth capability adoption. Supporting the principle of re-use, Solution Views describes how the various eHealth Capabilities should be implemented to best leverage existing eHealth capabilities, and therefore maximise return on investment.
  The National eHealth Architecture allows health organisations to scope, plan and align their own capabilities and services so they can be deployed in a more timely manner with the ability to maximise interoperability and interact more effectively with solution sets either adopted internally for A2A or A2E patterns or externally as part of B2B or B2C patterns. In the future it could provide a channel to allow vendors to publicise their offerings in terms of a nationally defined capability view and better understand the market environment in which their products exist and add value, highlighting opportunities in eHealth market for innovation.
• The second is the eHealth Interoperability Specifications, National Infrastructure Solutions and Frameworks developed collaboratively by NEHTA and the eHealth sector in line with the strategically selected priority areas. These platform independent components are necessarily abstract to cater for the wide variety of technology platforms that exist within the eHealth sector. These components fulfil a variety of eHealth capabilities and can be adopted or interfaced with by the eHealth sector. In effect eHealth Interoperability Specifications, National Infrastructure Solutions and Frameworks are NEHTA’s contribution to the national eHealth capabilities.
• The third is the NEHTA Enterprise Architecture, which utilises traditional Enterprise Architecture approaches ensuring strategically aligned, consistent deliverables and outcomes.

eHealth Interoperability Framework
The eHealth Interoperability Framework provides a shared language for defining business context for eHealth systems, designing eHealth solutions and supporting standards-based conformance processes. The aim is to provide an increasing level of semantic interoperability both between humans involved in designing and building systems and between eHealth systems.

The framework was developed in response to the National eHealth strategy with the aim of supporting national alignment and coordination, in terms of co-existence of national and local solutions while balancing regulation and competition/innovation.

The framework adopts the approach of the HL7 Service Aware Interoperability Framework (SAIF) and the earlier versions have been used to structure NEHTA specifications, in particular the ETP and PCEHR specifications. NEHTA is now further validating this framework to support tool-based development of its specifications.

The eHealth Interoperability is currently going through final review before being submitted to Standards Australia.

NEHTA Blueprint
The NEHTA Blueprint is a reference document intended to familiarise readers with major eHealth capabilities NEHTA is promoting and supporting for national adoption. It is a representation of the National eHealth Architecture that focuses on the capabilities being promoted by NEHTA and its partners.

Capabilities being implemented include; identifiers for individuals, providers and organisations, authentication and access control, secure messaging, clinical terminologies and information, supply chain, pathology requests and reports, diagnostic imaging requests and reports, medications management, referrals and discharge summaries, telehealth, care planning and coordination, national provider directories, personally controlled electronic health records.

Readers should subsequently understand:

• The eHealth capabilities being delivered by NEHTA
• The broader eHealth capability context
• A high level view of the strategy, risks, benefits and approach
• Where to find more information about specific eHealth capabilities

The Blueprint brings together and summarises the key design documents from across the NEHTA portfolio into a single living document.  The Blueprint will be periodically updated as the NEHTA portfolio evolves.

The NEHTA eHealth Blueprint is intended to help the eHealth sector understand the breadth of major eHealth capabilities to be adopted nationally. This includes a range of capabilities around identifiers for individuals, pathology requests and reports, diagnostic imaging requests and reports, managing medications, referrals, discharge summaries, provider identifiers, organisation identifiers, authentication, secure messaging, clinical terminologies and supply chain.

Contact Todd Davey, Manager Enterprise Architecture Office  - This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Interoperability and eHealth Standards

Interoperability is a capability of an organisation or system to use, offer and exchange business or technical services with another organisation or system. In simple terms, this means that your Apple Mac can understand my PC.

eHealth is the exchange of clinical information on an industry-wide basis. There is an increasing demand for clinical information to be exchanged between individual healthcare practitioners, healthcare provider organisations and State and Territory health departments. Interoperability will enable this to happen.

Standards
In order for interoperability to succeed a suite of nationally-defined standards is essential. Open standards are the cornerstone of interoperability as they allow eHealth systems to evolve without being constrained by proprietary software products.

Interoperability is vital as it drives toward electronic interconnectivity to deliver better health outcomes in a more cost-effective way.

Contact
Dr. Andy Bond, Manager Interoperability and eHealth Standards – This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it