The fabulously nicknamed coalition of the willing, better known as the Council for Connected Care or Triple CCC, released its inaugural annual review this week looking at progress in Australia’s five-year national healthcare interoperability plan.

The council was set up last year to provide oversight on what is a large program of work to connect up Australia’s healthcare system. It has met four times, each time looking at a different aspect of the roadmap for an interoperable health system.

The review covers the CCC’s thoughts and guidance on where we should be at with the 44 different actions outlined in the interoperability plan, and to be honest, it looks like we’re getting there.

Quite a few big initiatives announced early last year as part of the interoperability plan have now been ticked off, including the roadmap for improving the adoption and use of national healthcare identifiers, which is incredibly important work in getting the government’s sharing by default policy through, particularly for pathology and diagnostic imaging.

This simply will not happen until pathology and DI requesting and reporting is fully digital and accompanied by an IHI. The heavy yards though will need to be done in getting hospitals to use the HI Service and mapping MRNs to it.

A couple of the initiatives have flown under the radar somewhat, including the publication of the digital health standards catalogue, a list of the relevant standards in digital health that anyone developing or procuring software needs to know. This was promised in the plan, and, as announced at the recent HIE meeting in Canberra, it has been delivered.

It doesn’t particularly look like very important work but it is, and it will make life a hell of lot easier for vendors and for state governments in particular when procuring large pieces of technology. The Australian Digital Health Agency’s conformance framework is also complete and has been published on the ADHA website. While this obscure sort of regulation is baffling to many, it will be essential for software vendors and developers wanting to sell their products in Australia.

The review also covers the procurement guidelines for digital health solutions that will align with new guidelines from the federal government and to provide guidance to healthcare organisations wanting to purchase those solutions. And there’s also the recently discussed HIE itself.

For Pulse+IT, however, the most important work that ADHA has done in the past year, in association with Department of Health and Ageing, the CSIRO and HL7 Australia, is providing real support for the adoption and implementation of national interoperability standards.

The standout initiative is the Sparked accelerator, which has achieved a great deal in a very short amount of time. While ADHA CEO Amanda Cattermole says the Council for Connected Care has been a catalyst for change, it was Sparked that sparked it all up.

And the most important part of getting Sparked moving was the money put aside in last year’s federal budget and a firm commitment from DoHAC for the development and implementation of standards across the board in Australia. Spark is just a two-year program, but we imagine that it’ll keep going.

It has achieved so much already with the AU core data for interoperability released and the AU core FHIR implementation guide and eRequesting implementation guide ready for balloting in the next month.

A coalition of the willing is one thing, but it does get down to money and political will in the end. Thankfully, Australia seems to have both in abundance at the moment.

Not so our friends in New Zealand, who as we’ve reported have had a horror run recently. While many in the sector are purporting to agree with the new government’s austerity policy, including its decision to pause the Hira health information program – which involved quite a lot of interoperability standards work, although HL7 NZ has always done a stellar job on that on a shoestring budget – you can tell they are seething with fury underneath.

Not so digital health legend Tom Bowden, who has taken a different view than most of the decision by the New Zealand government to withdraw or to return funding for digital and data and to pause Hira.

Tom shares with many a suspicion of the direction of government policy for sharing electronic health records for some time. Tom, who established HealthLink and has seen it become the dominant secure messaging service in Australia and New Zealand over the last 30 years, knows a bit about the history of New Zealand health information technology and what works and what doesn’t seem to work.

In today’s environment where there is very little money, he is advocating for using existing technology in better ways rather than channel millions and billions into infrastructure with little or no guarantee of success.

New Zealand has a highly successful patient portal program that the majority of general practices use and which are already able to share data with hospitals, so why not use them rather than build a new shared EHR? Tom advocates for what he is calling Principal Patient Records (PPR), which are managed by the practices that 90 per cent of New Zealanders are enrolled with.

Take a look at his arguments, backed up by studies in the published literature, and tell us what you think. It was our most read story for the week.

Next week, Pulse+IT is off to the HIC conference in Brisbane. It’s pretty obvious from the program that AI, change management and workforce issues will be high on the agenda, with cyber security prominent as well. So will our old friend interoperability, with quite a few sessions on FHIR that we’ll be getting ourselves along to. We hope to see you there, and we’ll bring all you all the news next week.

That brings us to our poll question for the week:

Do you think Australia has made significant progress in interoperability this year?

Vote here and leave your comments below.

Last week, we asked: do you think healthcare providers have a duty to share patient data with government systems? We had a big response to this poll, with the majority voting that yes, they agree: 59 per cent said yes, but 41 per cent said no.

There were also loads of comments. Here’s what you said.