NT Health Improving Health Outcomes Across the Territory
The Northern Territory’s eHealthNT program is breaking down the distance barriers to quality and coordinated health service delivery through the implementation of integrated e-health solutions right across the Territory.eHealthNT’s flagship program, the Shared Electronic Health Record, recently passed the milestone of 25,000 people registered to participate. With a voluntary participation rate of 90 percent in the communities that have agreed to participate, the program is on track to sign up half of the Territory’s total indigenous population.
The Shared Electronic Health Record is a summary of a patient’s important health information that can be accessed quickly and securely by participating health professionals at the point of care, without the need for faxing paper records or multiple phone calls between health providers. Patients confidential health information is stored in a safe computer repository that complies with the highest national standards for privacy and security.
The Shared Electronic Health Record began as a trial in the Katherine region in 2002, to help determine whether there could be improvements in the continuity of regional healthcare across the continuum by creating a secure central repository of health information and giving health care providers timely access to it.
The trial demonstrated the benefits of electronic information sharing in saving time, improving co-ordination and quality of health service delivery across vast distances, and making it easier to diagnose and treat patients in emergency situations. Health professionals liked the user-friendly method of sending and receiving health information from their own desktop, as the program was integrated with their existing computerized clinical information systems.
The potential of electronic health service delivery was evident to the Australian and Northern Territory Governments, who funded implementation of the program across the Territory commencing in Katherine in July 2005.
Since then, 54 provider sites have commenced participation in the Shared Electronic Health Record, including all Northern Territory public hospitals, remote health centres and recently, three Darwin-based private GP practices. Over 1,700 health professionals and 25,000 consumers have registered to participate. The reach of the program now extends from Tiwi Islands in the north and south to desert communities in northern South Australia.
The successful implementation of the Shared Electronic Health Record is largely due to a high degree of consultation and collaboration with Indigenous community elders and leaders, community and health industry representatives. This includes the independent Aboriginal Medical Services in the NT, their representative body, the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance of the Northern Territory and more recently the General Practice Network NT who are brokering implementation in urban private GP practices.
Speaking at the launch of the Shared Electronic Health Record in Central Australia, CEO of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, Stephanie Bell, welcomed the changes brought by the Shared Electronic Health Record. “Our clinicians will be able to access an up to date summary of the important medical information needed, very quickly,” she said.
Pensioner and returned serviceman, Francis Hayes, is a Ngalakan Elder and Chair of the Shared Electronic Health Record Consumer Advisory Group. "Last year I went to visit my family at a remote community (to) attend an important cultural meeting. I was out there for a whole week. When I got there, I found out I had left my medicine in Katherine. I went to the local Health Centre and they were able to look up my Shared Electronic Health Record and find out what my medication was. They gave me enough pills to keep me going for the week.”
The Shared Electronic Health Record will aid the development of other national and cross-jurisdictional initiatives in electronic health service delivery, including common standards and best practice strategies.
eHealthNT is working on a range of complementary e-health initiatives, including a secure electronic messaging service to provide easy, fast and secure transfer of clinical information directly between participating health care professionals; and the electronic transfer of prescriptions, which is the first of its kind in Australia.