NEHTA looks globally to advance Australian e-health reform
NEHTA collaborates with e-health leaders from the US, UK and Canada to provide valuable input into Australia’s e-health strategy.
The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) today announced that it has commenced its program of consultation and collaboration with international government and industry leaders to inform NEHTA’s program of work.
NEHTA has been tasked to provide the critical standards and infrastructure required to support the connectivity and interoperability of electronic health information systems across Australia.
As many other countries are striving towards the same goal as Australia and have encountered similar complexities and challenges in ‘getting it right’, NEHTA, CEO, Dr Ian Reinecke maintains that it is vital to draw on the knowledge of other nations to inform NEHTA’s work outputs.
“Australia needs to understand the e-health experiences of other countries, to learn from them and seek international alignment on key areas such as standards,” he said. “It is also important to look at success models around the world and consider how those processes and approaches may apply to e-health initiatives here.”
Earlier this month, Dr Reinecke, met with Richard Alvarez, President and CEO, Canada Health Infoway, David Brailer, National Coordinator for Health IT United States, and Richard Granger, Director General of IT, United Kingdom, to discuss common themes and goals that could be aligned and experience that could be leveraged on an international scale. These discussions have proved to be extremely valuable and a commitment to establish informal working groups on an ongoing basis has been made.
“The objective is to achieve alignment wherever possible. Harmonisation of healthcare information technology requirements will assist multi national health IT organisations deploying common international standards. This will simplify the procurement and deployment of health IT solutions, increase the rate of adoption and achieve cost efficiencies across the development and implementation spectrum,” Dr Reinecke said.
NEHTA’s consultative approach extends to seeking out e-health experts from around the world to inform best practice methods for Australia. This week US e-health luminary, Ken Rubin, will be in Sydney at NEHTA’s invitation to speak at a range of forums on e-health standards and consult with key NEHTA stakeholders.
Ken Rubin provided consultative support as a lead architect supporting the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Information Architecture Office – the VHA is the largest healthcare provider in the United States and is a model that can add great value to the NEHTA work program.
“Ken Rubin’s leadership in e-health is unparalleled; the US Veterans Health Administration is regarded as one of the best and most successful e-health systems in the world. We are very fortunate at NEHTA to have him share his experiences with us.”
Earlier this year, Ken was one of two international assessors responsible for independent verification and validation of NEHTA’s electronic health record architecture report.
“I have seen the approach that NEHTA is proposing for their program of work,” Mr. Rubin said. “From my experience, I’m pleased to say, they are definitely on the right path.”
Mr. Rubin is actively involved with industry standards groups such as Health Level Seven and the Object Management Group in developing approaches to semantic interoperability and service architecture. His speaking engagements whilst in Sydney include a Standards Seminar hosted by Standards Australia and NEHTA on May 22 - 23, the IT-014 Joint Working Group Meeting on May 23 and 24 hosted by Standards Australia, and the 10th HL7 Australia Conference May 25.
About Ken Rubin
Ken Rubin is a senior healthcare architect with Electronic Data Systems, Inc. (EDS) primarily focused on health informatics, enterprise architecture, and electronic health record interoperability. Mr. Rubin has over fifteen years of experience and ten years of health informatics experience, seven of which as the lead Enterprise Application Architect for the [US] Veterans Health Administration (with 150,000 employees is the largest healthcare provider in the United States). This project today is regarded as one of the best e-health systems in the world. Mr. Rubin is very active in the standards community, holding positions as co-chair of the HSSP project, the HL7 Service-Oriented Architecture Special Interest Group, the OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force, and previously the HL7 Process Improvement Committee. Mr. Rubin was recently a chapter author on modeling for a recent book in the Springer Medical Informatics book series.
Ken’s previous roles have included technical consultancy to the Military Health System, U.S. Marshals Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).