The following e-mail appeared a few days ago.
From: NEHTA Industry Communications
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2012 1:04 PM
To: NEHTA Industry Communications
Subject: PIP eHealth Incentive - New requirements and Vendor Support
Dear All,
The Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing has now released the five requirements for the new Practice Incentives Program eHealth Incentive. Letters and requirements to practices will be distributed by mail today and we attach a copy of this correspondence for your information. We expect all practices to have received this within the next few days.
Your customers may be contacting you shortly to ascertain your intention to list your product(s) on the PIP eHealth Product Register. You may wish to consider contacting your customer base to indicate your companies’ intentions in relation to product conformance in order to reduce the impact of calls from practices on your business.
The purpose of this email is to introduce the support material that is now available to you via the PIP website www.nehta.gov.au/pip:
PIP Implementation overviews
The purpose of these documents is to give practices information and guidance about the Practice Incentives Program (PIP) eHealth Incentive requirements and to provide links to more detailed sources of information. The checklist items below are intended to help establish eligibility against this Requirement and should be read in conjunction with the PIP eHealth Incentive Guidelines available at www.humanservices.gov.au > Health Professionals> Incentives and Allowances> Practice Incentives Program (PIP)
(Note this is found here:
PIP eHealth Product Register
Software vendors must declare the conformance of their products to be included in the PIP eHealth Product Register. The requirements to demonstrate software conformance for the PIP eHealth incentive are provided on the Software Vendors page.
Software vendors
This section will provide you with some information about how to demonstrate software conformance for PIP and how to list your product onto the PIP eHealth Product Register
FAQs
This section should answer any questions you may have.
Contacts
Useful contact details for additional support.
Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions.
NEHTA Industry Communications.
Attached to this e-mail are some Human Services Documents and a letter which provide similar information to that found at the link above.
Here is the link to start exploring.
The e-Health Program is introduced thus:
E-Health Incentive Introduction.
The eHealth incentive aims to encourage general practices to keep up to date with the latest developments in eHealth to assist in improving administration processes and enhancing the quality of patient care by, for example, by supporting the capacity to share accurate electronic patient records.
The Australian Government announced as part of the 2012-13 Budget that new PIP eHealth Incentive requirements had been developed in order to support the delivery of current eHealth initiatives particularly the personally controlled electronic health (eHealth) records system.
The new requirements and associated dates are:
Integrating Healthcare Identifiers into Electronic Practice Records | 1 February 2013 |
Secure Messaging | 1 February 2013 |
Data Records and Clinical Coding | 1 February 2013 |
Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions | 1 February 2013 |
PCEHR | 1 May 2013 |
----- End Extract.
The very best bit is provided under each area:
Additional Reference Material
- For detailed implementation guidance for practice managers, view the eHealth Clinician's Desktop User Guide R1 GP - FINAL v1 0.
- View conformant products on the PIP eHealth Product Register.
The product register is currently empty and the Desktop User Guide is a 40+ page document.
Here you are informed that (Page 5):
----- Begin Extract
This version of the User Guide is applicable for general practices and covers the following currently available eHealth functionality that is built into conformant Desktop Software:
· Healthcare Identifiers; and
· Clinical Document (CDA6) Viewing.
Further versions of the User Guide will be developed to align with future releases of NEHTA specified eHealth functionality (listed below), and for other community-based healthcare professionals, e.g. private specialists and allied health professionals.
The national eHealth program will enable the delivery over time of major new nationally agreed standards based eHealth services such as:
- Shared Health Summaries, Event Summaries, and access to the national personally controlled electronic health (eHealth) record system;
- Secure Message Delivery, and improved security, including e-Signatures;
- e-Referrals, e-Discharge Summaries, and e-Specialist Letters;
- e-Medication Management, including Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions and improvements to e-Prescribing; and
- e-Diagnostic Services, including e-Requesting and e-Reporting for pathology and diagnostic imaging.
----- End Extract
So we are sure to see versions 1 to n over the next weeks and months.
I strongly suggest you download and browse this document. Having done that just reflect what all those in two and three man practices with 2 secretaries and a bookkeeper are going to make of what they are reading.
I hear the sighs of horror and resignation. They have neither the skills or the resources to manage all this are provided with a long set of links to add to their reading list to try and work out what is needed.
Nowhere are the services provided to help in any form I can see.
I think many will just throw in the towel and move on seeing a few more patients to make up for the money they lose.
It seems the Australian Medicare Locals Network (AMLN) but sadly Google does not seem to find a website for this lot.
My guess is that this fiasco will be the end of any GP co-operation with the NEHRS / PCEHR.
DoHA has always wanted to reduce the cost of PIP and this will certainly do it!
David.