The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) has joined forces with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to work on connecting Australia’s healthcare system all round the nation.
Chief Executive of ADHA, Amanda Cattermole said the collaboration with CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre (AEHRC) would deliver a centre of excellence for connecting across the healthcare system through the National Clinical Terminology Service (NCTS).
“It will further strengthen both organisations’ reputations as leaders in clinical terminology,” Ms Cattermole said.
“The intention of the collaboration is to enable connectivity across all health care settings,” she said.
“This is achieved through driving future interoperability standards and governance discussions across different systems and health care settings to improve connectivity.”
Ms Cattermole said the Agency would retain responsibility for governance and the strategic role of end-to-end management, while CSIRO would deliver the services and functions required to manage the NCTS, as well as content authoring and tooling.
Chief Executive of CSIRO’s AEHRC, David Hansen said the partnership presented an exciting opportunity to improve the connectedness of Australia’s healthcare system.
“The services that we provide help enable different parts of the system to ‘talk’ to one another, enabling smoother health service delivery, reduced patient burden and fewer costs,” Dr Hansen said.
“The NCTS currently provides terminology services and tools that include an online browser, a mapping and authoring platform and CSIRO’s national syndication server (Ontoserver),” he said.
“To date, more than 100 organisations in Australia have accessed the Ontoserver licence through the NCTS sublicence – lowering the barrier to the adoption of interoperability standards in our health records.”
Dr Hansen said that for the next five years, the partnership’s work will continue to refresh other NCTS tooling to further improve the connectivity of health information for Australian consumers and healthcare providers.
