The Victorian Department of Health is on the market for a mental health and wellbeing client management system (MHWCMS) that will link to the planned Health Information Exchange (HIE) to provide a single statewide mental health and wellbeing record.
The development of a statewide record was one of the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System in 2021. The CMS will replace the existing Client Management Interface (CMI) first deployed in 1999.
Victoria plans to roll out its HIE to support secure sharing of a broad set of clinical data types between public health services, including the various electronic medical record systems in use. The first step will be the sharing of pathology data through the HIE from the disparate laboratory information systems in use.
The department envisions an HIE that will be built within its centrally hosted Azure environment and will interface with health service systems via its Rhapsody integration engine.
The department has issued a tender for the new MHWCMS, which it says will be a single shared application used across the state’s new and existing mental health and wellbeing service providers.
It will be hosted in the department’s Microsoft Azure tenancy, and integrated with the HIE to provide the single statewide mental health and wellbeing record. Alternatively, it can be hosted in an alternate cloud hosting platform but integrated with the HIE through common messaging standards.
It will not be required to integrate with the various EMRs in use around the state.
“The MHWCMS will be fully integrated with the HIE, which will facilitate collection and sharing of a person’s mental health information between service provider organisations which implement the MHWCMS solution and other service provider organisations which will not implement the MHWCMS solution,” the tender documents say.
“The sharing of information with the HIE and establishment of the single state-wide electronic mental health and wellbeing record will support a person to transition safely between services or care levels and will support the provision of safe, integrated, high-quality treatment, care, and support.”
The tender closes on December 15.
Small correction: The Victorian RAPID / CMI System went live in October 2000 as a late Y2K project (the previous system worked happily after a hardware / OS platform upgrade) and not in 1999.