Ross, Thank you for clarifying some of those technical aspects and the issues for me.
What has become quite clear to me is that it will still be some time before legal electronically signed referrals become a reality as long as Med Aus sticks to its "Notice of IT Standards under the ETA 1999 for Electronic and Paper" particularly with reference to section 3.3(c). http://www.medicareaustralia.gov.au/resources/pki/ma_notice_of_it_standards_ electronic_and_paper_011005.pdf for anyone who cares and hasn't read this before, it's been out for some time. Many GPs have the potential to get sucked into superficially signing the outgoing referral and, on the receiving end, Specialists accepting that such a 'signature' is all that's needed to be legal; they would never have a clue that the signature 'disappears' once in their respective EHR. Jan >-----Original Message----- >From: Ross Davey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Wednesday, 6 December 2006 7:14 PM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; General Practice Computing Group Talk >Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] Re[2]: [Nat-Div] More questions on Argus > > >J Collett wrote: >> But how do you accomplish this when you send the document as an >attachment >> in an email which is then 'stripped' off to be imported into an >EHR? Is the >> attachment signed as well and I just don't know where to look? >> >> >> >Whether the document is in an attachment or not is immaterial. There >are a number of choices of what to sign and this is a reasonable matter >of debate, however whether you use MO or Argus or HealthLink the issue >of what happens to the signature once the document is imported into MD >or Genie etc remains the same regardless of what transport product you >are using. The signtaure is lost once it is passed to a clinical >application that cant handle signatures. > >I would think that MO does the same as we do. You can view the document >and signature from the database store of the document within MO or >Argus. But once the document is imported into the clinical app, it >loses its signature unless the clinical app implements viewing of the >digital signature in the same way as the message transport facility has. >(really the signing of the document should not be a function of the >message transport facility, but should be a function of the sending and >receiving application) Now you might sign a facsimile of the document >that has been placed in an OBX segment of the HL7 or you might sign >separately the atomised data in the OBX segments and then sign >separately the facsimile of the document, or you might sign the entire >HL7 message.. The trick is to come up with a scheme that everyone >agrees upon and is extensible and handles both document 'blobs' and >atomised HL7 data (and maybe even messages that are not HL7) and maybe >even allows different people to sign different components of a document >as is now possible in a paper-based form. > >Tricky. We think this needs a lot more thought before going to >Standards Australia. > >NeHTA better get on with it and start to focus on 'content/payload' >issues otherwise we will just have to get together and decide on this >ourselves. > >cheers >Ross Davey > > > >------------------------------- >Ross Davey >CEO >ArgusConnect Pty Ltd >Ph: 03 5335 2220 >Mob: 0417 548608 >Web: www.argusconnect.com.au >------------------------------- > > _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
