Colleagues, I do agree with Jane that unnecessary time is being spent on the discussion around AHML accreditation, however it is my job to set the record straight. According to an email from our Australian office on 23rd March 2006 were as of that date authorised to use the AHML logo on our website and printed material and to use the following statement 'HealthLink HL7 message specifications for Pathology and Referral have been assessed by AHML and found to be inline with Australian Standards'- ref Chris Lynton-Moll. I tend to take the view that if AHML found our work to be "Inline with the standards", then we do have "the big tick", to the extent we can, bearing in mind that we validate messages and do not create them.....
The whole area of conformance with HL7 standards really is a bit of a black art, there are changes being made all the time, versions 2.4 and 2.5 of HL7 are now imminent if not upon us, we have just been through an 18 month hiatus during which NEHTA resisted even endorsing HL7, fortunately they have now seen the light. It is no wonder that people throw up their hands in horror and make such little progress because it is a confusing landscape. However we are planning to do something further about it.... As follows... We (HealthLink) are going to speak with AHML to see what we need to do to help get ALL of our vendor partners' ORU and REF messages AHML accredited. They must be reasonably close as they do conform with our validation profiles which "have been found by AHML to be inline with Australian standards". But we want to go all the way. We will pay special attention to studying the matters raised by Andrew MacIntyre. I look forward to letting colleagues on this list know how we are going as we assist these vendors to step through this process with AHML. A list of our vendor partners can be found in an ad in the latest IT Pulse magazine. It includes all of the major vendors active in Australia and we are adding more to it. Current partners account for approximately 95% of GP desktops. Now Andrew, back to the debate at hand. If we can get all of our vendor partners up to a certified standard (and you have to admit that as they now produce HL7 messages that are validated by a system that has been "found to be inline with Australian standards" they must be pretty close; then why do their messages need to be transformed or altered en route by a third party system?, would it not be better to validate their messages and accept them or reject them at source, sending them on unaltered? This creates clearer demarcation and accountability, something very necessary in a large-scale e-Health environment, does it not? Admittedly what we are recommending is harder to do as we know to our great cost, however it does create a very robust, scaleable, dependable, well defined e-Health system. I now look forward to a more focused discussion on this issue. With kind regards, Tom Bowden CEO HealthLink ( AHML endorsed as "Inline with Australian Standards Since March 2006") _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
