The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) has now resumed testing specifications after halting eHealth records trials, said NEHTA CEO Peter Fleming.
Back in January, NEHTA discovered that due to detected technical incompatibilities for specifications pushed to the eHealth trial sites, the implementation of primary care eHealth software has paused.
However NEHTA has now re-commenced testing for the national Accenture platform to support the eHealth records this month, ensuring the system interoperates with other vendors’ software.
Mr. Fleming spoke in a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday, confirming NEHTA tested the revamped specifications internally before pushing it to the trial sites.
“The actual problem that was detected has been fixed, and we’re now testing that. One of the things that we do ourselves is that we build out the system ourselves. So everything we write a specification for we actually build it.”
Mr. Fleming admitted that despite the information and structured requirements documents provided in November 2011 were correct, NEHTA had failed to provide a complete change control log to show the differences between the draft specifications delivered to the wave sites in May 2011.
“What happened, and shouldn’t have happened, was we didn’t fully manage our change controls, so when we published the November specification, we didn’t give the full change control log to the wave one and wave two sites….What we’ve had to do is go back and update that change log to reflect those changes,” he said.
He advised the delivery of the personally controlled e-health records (PCEHR) for all Australian, due July 1st 2012, will not be impacted by the delay, nor the cost will be affected.
“In fact … it doesn’t look like it has cost anything in terms of dollars because the work that we have to do in terms of transitioning the wave sites across to the national infrastructure had to happen anyway,” he said. “We had to put a slight delay on the work, but we’ve been able to rejig the processes so it doesn’t look like financially it has cost us anything. Time-wise, probably about six weeks.”
NEHTA will continue testing for all other system due to launch with the eHealth records by July 1st will until the launch date.
CeBIT Australia’s eHealth 2012 Conference will take place on 23 May 2012.