Concept of Operations: Relating to the introduction of a Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record System
2.8 Potential enhancements
The National E-Health Strategy proposed that the PCEHR System rollout be undertaken via an incremental approach, with the capabilities of the system being expanded over a four-year implementation period.Potential enhancements could focus on delivering quality improvements and enhancements based on stakeholder demand and lessons learned from implementation and adoption activities. Candidates for later potential enhancements could include, but are not limited to:
- Enhancements to the registration processes.
- Support for collection of a broader range of health information from healthcare providers, such as:
- Delivery of any optional elements delayed from the first release of the PCEHR System.
- Advance care directives (i.e. storage of the directive itself in the PCEHR System rather than just information about the custodian).
- Pathology requests.
- Diagnostic imaging reports, images and requests.
- Health information from registries.
- Care plans.
- Assessments tools.
- Reports from practice-based diagnostic tools (e.g. electrocardiograms).
- Pharmacy based medicine reviews and medication profiles.
- Extensions to the Shared Health Summary to include fields such as infectious disease status, information about implants, etc.
- Information to support an individual with disabilities.
- Information around palliative care.
- The addition of consumer-oriented features, such as:
- Integration with consumer-oriented personal health records enabling an alternative form of interaction by an individual with their PCEHR.
- Collection of information from consumer devices such as blood pressure monitors, blood glucose monitors, etc.
- Access to information within other sources, such as:
- Screening registers, such as the National Bowel Cancer Screening Register, BreastScreen Australia registries, pap smear registries, etc.
- Addition of new views to the PCEHR System to support the needs of specific groups, such as:
- Views to support management of chronic diseases.
- Views to support individuals and their representatives.
- Views to support specific healthcare providers, such as nurses and allied health providers.
- Enhancements to the template service to support more dynamic and flexible approaches to templating.
- Enhancements to the reporting service to support a wider range of approved uses.
- Enhancements to the PCEHR System access controls.
- Enhancements to support mobile devices.
- Enhancements to facilitate implementation of clinical decision support tools within clinical systems and portals, which leverage information from the PCEHR System.
