You could be forgiven for thinking there is a new plague is doing the rounds this week, as yet more digital health blueprints, strategies, roadmaps and action plans are released on to an already flooded market.

This week saw not just a roadmap to expand and improve the Healthcare Identifiers Service but also the long-awaited aged care data and digital strategy and action plan.

New Zealand got into the swing of things too with a government policy statement on health for the next three years that included health infrastructure, but which is not to be confused with the 10-year infrastructure investment plan that Health New Zealand will be releasing later this year and which is regularly spruiked by Health Minister Shane Reti to avoid difficult questions on the disastrous decision to cut funding for digital health.

Australia’s roadmap to expand and improve its HI Service has been on the cards for several years and follows a 2020 review of the My Health Records legislation that recommended actions to improve the use of healthcare identifiers.

There is still inconsistent use of the HI system, which was first introduced in 2010. While every person in Australia is assigned an individual healthcare identifier (IHI) and healthcare organisations and providers have their individual identifiers – known by their very silly acronyms HPI-Is and HPI-Os – it will come as news to most people.

Medicare card number, yes. IHI? No. Mapping the HI Service to patient records in GP systems and medical record numbers in hospital systems is an ongoing drama, and the lack of consistent use has held up sharing of pathology results in particular.

However, while everyone may be suffering from planning fatigue, the five-year upgrade to the HI Service is actually an essential job, and is aligned with the national healthcare interoperability plan.

An interesting part of the HI Service roadmap is the assignment of an IHI for newborns. This has been mooted for many years to ensure that a My Health Record can be created for every individual, but the lack of it has apparently has caused a lot of barriers to the creation of the long-touted national child health record, which has not yet seen the light of day.

This week also saw the release of the aged care data and digital strategy, which has been accompanied by yet another action plan. This is actually a good thing: while the strategy sets out the vision and mission statement, it’s the action plan where all of the good bits appear.

We think that this action plan is doable although ambitious – it is aged care after all – and there are some pitfalls to negotiate when comes to things like the integration of My Aged Care with My Health Record. (We’ve been reporting on this for a decade and nothing has ever come to fruition.)

There are other initiatives that are very much doable and are under way, including the development of standards for clinical information systems used in aged care, which the Australian Digital Health Agency is doing some very good work on.

And there are some quite interesting initiatives in the action plan that we look forward to more detail on, including trials of virtual nursing in aged care and the implementation of the national prescription delivery service into aged care to boost electronic prescribing.

We think the action plan is pretty good but one problem it will face is the competition with the plethora of other digital health blueprints, strategies, action plans and roadmaps that have been released in the last 18 months, including the National Digital Health Strategy and the National Interoperability Strategy.

The situation is so gridlocked that the Digital Health CRC took it upon itself recently to write a handy explainer covering what all of these plans mean and how they all fit together. Released earlier this year and written by the DHCRC’s Isobel Frean, it makes a lot of sense of what is an extremely complex area, and is a handy resource if you’re floundering.

Elsewhere, we’ve been looking ahead to the Australasian Institute of Digital Health’s HIC conference in early August. HIC has been the go-to conference for serious people in health informatics and digital health for many years, and it’s shaping up to be another one this year in Brisbane.

It is yet again a bumper program highlighted by the influence of artificial intelligence breakthroughs in digital health. Interested in fake patients and synthetic health data? HIC reveals all. Hopefully we’ll see you there.

That brings us to our poll question for the week:

Do you support the aged care data and digital action plan?

Vote here or leave your comments below.

Last week we asked: Is your organisation exploring the use of a CRM for patient engagement? Most voted no: 62.5% to 37.5%. Here’s what you said about it.