Telstra Health wins contract to digitize Australia’s health records system

Digital transformation is coming to Australia’s healthcare system on a national level. The country’s Digital Health Agency has awarded a contract to Telstra Health, to lead the overhaul of the My Health Record system, which a release says houses more than 1.8 billion clinical documents uploaded by hospitals, pathologists and other healthcare providers.

The three-year contract is worth AUD$33 million, and will be supported by key partners Leidos Australia and Smile Digital Health, the latter of which has a successful track record of enabling Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) – an international standard established by HL7 for the electronic exchange of healthcare information – in the Canadian health system and U.S. healthcare industry.

“As more Australians access and contribute to their health records, the time is now for innovating and updating the data architecture that supports health information sharing and future-proofing the nation’s healthcare infrastructure,” says the announcement from Telstra.

The company asserts that the existing system, which relies on reliance on Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), “can no longer fully support the ease of integration needed” for emerging tech solutions.

“Healthcare providers often encounter obstacles in extracting specific, actionable data from CDA documents, leading to inefficiencies at the point of care and hampering the seamless flow of information between systems.”

Replacing the outdated, PDF-based system will enable real-time, interoperable data exchange.

Australian Digital Health Agency CEO Amanda Cattermole says the agency undertook “a rigorous selection process” in selecting Telstra Health for the job, and recognizes the firm’s “expertise and innovative approach to building a future-ready health data infrastructure for all Australians.”

Telstra Health Managing Director Elizabeth Koff says the collaboration will enhance connectivity and secure data exchange. “The unified health data platform, built natively on FHIR standards, will play a key role in enabling real-time health information sharing for improving patient outcomes and enhancing the care journey.”

Telstra also operates the Australian government’s National Cancer Screening Register, and earlier this year won a $220 million contract with the Department of Social Services earlier this year to deliver the government’s Leaving Violence Program for victims of domestic violence.

The FHIR standard has spurred similar activity in the U.S. healthcare industry, where the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is developing a nationwide interoperable platform to allow patients to retrieve and manage health records through consumer-facing applications. Its voluntary CMS Interoperability Framework calls for applications to support FHIR-based APIs that allow for real-time retrieval of medical data across participating systems.

Article Topics

Australia  |  biometrics  |  digital government  |  government purchasing  |  healthcare  |  identity management  |  Leidos  |  patient identification  |  Telstra