The National E-Health Transition Authority said the so-called Health Level 7 would be the national standard for the electronic messaging of health information across Australia.
NEHTA said across the Australian healthcare sector there were many different types of software and systems used in the exchange of information, and that these systems were currently forced to use a variety of different exchange formats to send and receive in formation.
To ensure that all systems across Australia have the ability to reliably and safely communicate with each other, a standard exchange format is required, the authority said in a statement.
“This decision (to use the HL7 standard) provides a clear national direction,” NEHTA chief executive Ian Reinecke said.
“Those who develop these systems now have certainty about what the Australian customers of their systems will require,” he said.
“Without all systems in the healthcare sector using common standards such as this, the promise of electronic health communication can’t be fulfilled on a national scale.”
Mr Reinecke said it was critical that the nation adopt a single standard to both reduce health care complexity and cost, and to endure the integrity of the health information in Australian healthcare system.
Most observers had assumed the move to HL7 was inevitable, as the standard had already been widely adopted in the United States, Canada and Britain.
It was felt that Australia was too small to risk adopting a separate standard, which would have made access to overseas software develops more difficult and expensive.
NEHTA will now focus on developing Web services specifications based on work undertaken by the HL7 Services Specification Project (HSSP), and content specifications based on the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture – Release 2 (CDA R2) for areas such as referral, discharge, prescribing, dispensing and pathology.
“NEHTA will work closely with HL7 Australia and Standards Australia in this development work,” Dr Reinecke said.
“In addition, NEHTA is closely liaising with its international counterparts to ensure that the specifications developed in Australia are consistent with international efforts,” he said.
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