Western Australia to push health identifiers

Western Australia (WA) Health recently announced its intention to purchase a software to move forward with the Health Identifiers initiative of the National e-Health Transition Authority (NeHTA). The software will provide Enterprise Master Patient Index and Enterprise Provider Index, including implementation and integration with other healthcare systems and data cleansing. The Health Identifiers Solution will be integrated with existing and proposed WA Health systems and interfaced with other providers’ systems and with the National Health Identifiers service. According to WA Health, the agency currently has more than 30 unrelated sources of patient and provider identification in use as a result of increases in the number of locations from which patients can access care, the diversification of health care delivery, and increases in the number of health care providers. This diversity resulted to some patients have to date been incorrectly identified leading to “adverse patient outcomes”, reductions in standard of health care provided, and time wasted on managing and consolidating duplicate patient and provider records. The Health Identifiers initiative is aimed at setting up nationally assigned unique numbers which identify a patient, a qualified person that provides health services or an organisation that provides health services.
The solution will also be a “critical enabling technology” to further local programs such as the state’s Patient Administration System (PAS), Clinical Information Systems (CIS) and the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Program.

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