Advancing national health professional cooperation to improve health outcomes

There is a need to bring together, from a National perspective, healthcare practitioners, academics, scientists, researchers, vendors, consultants and suppliers in an environment of cooperation and sharing to ensure that the proposed Australian Health Information Network meets the needs of all stakeholders. The current national approach to electronic health records aims to improve health outcomes together with a more effective delivery of health services.

We need to align these Governmental National efforts with expressed health professional needs and trends of care to ensure that these efforts result in the best possible outcomes from both a health care consumer and a health professional’s perspective. We need to ensure that the right data is being collected in a timely manner in the first place. From an IT infrastructure perspective the use of real world data to evaluate practice from which best practice protocols may be developed, large data sets are required so as not to bias the effect of treatment choice or processes of care on patient outcomes in the community. Such data sets need to include national standard data about each patient's health status on admission, patient preferences as well as their expectations of quality of life and achievements. There is a need to collect sound evidence of practice from real world data and to link this with health profession (nursing, medical, physiotherapy etc.) sensitive results and other outcomes of care. Such evidence should then be used to automate a review of current practice and to develop clinical guidelines. Can our clinical information systems meet these needs? What do the health professions need to do to enable this to happen?

This paper argues that this requires the provision of adequate resources to enable well informed clinical input for information projects throughout their development. A foremost requirement is to ensure that clinical data and information can be accurately and effectively communicated between all parties as required. This requires national openness, transparency, consensus and technical coherence amongst all health professionals regarding the minimum standard data sets to be made available by case type and to suit various purposes, enabling the necessary digital communication between all parties. This paper will explore how this may be achieved.