During the Health Informatics Conference in Brisbane in August 2011, the CEO of Australia’s National E-health Transition Authority, Peter Fleming, likened building the  national system of Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) to putting a man on the moon.Well let’s examine where we are at the end of 2011, with 6 months to go to […]

Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.26 version of the AMT  released by NEHTA today. All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. I can only assume that no-one else in Australia is regularly incorporating the monthly AMT releases into an application. After all this time, the download […]

Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.25 version of the AMT recently released by NEHTA. All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. I can only assume that no-one else in Australia is regularly incorporating the monthly AMT releases into an application. After all this time, the download process […]

I have, on a number of occasions over the past decade,  tried to explain the importance of building software, systems, national infrastructure, etc. on the right foundations. Other people who do this in the e-health arena often talk purely about the importance of standards and the analogy with the ‘rail gauge problem’ experienced in Australia […]

Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.24 version of the AMT released by NEHTA this afternoon. All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. Once again, it is a pity the download process cannot be automated. Perhaps if this were the 1980s NEHTA could publish the updates (with […]

  Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.23 version of the AMT released by NEHTA yesterday. All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. Once again, it is a pity the download process cannot be automated. Perhaps if this were the 1980s NEHTA could publish the updates (with […]

  Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.22 version of the AMT released by NEHTA this morning.   Although no mention is made in the release notes that accompany NEHTA’s release, the following interesting statements appeared in the email notification of the release:- “These references sets will support […]

Well, it’s just a little over 14 months till the launch of Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR). And we have already seen two ‘waves’ of grant funded ‘implementations’ announced by Health Minister Nicola Roxon. The PCEHR draft ‘Concept of Operations‘ was released publicly on the 12th of April and  organisations and individuals have until […]

Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to include the 2.21 version of the AMT released by NEHTA a few days ago. All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. The latest NEHTA release includes a useful Refset Library document that applies not only to the AMT but to SNOMED-AU refsets also. This […]

Fortunately, I’m now almost old enough to have forgotten the christmas pudding ritual – helping my father cut up the suet, spread out on sheets  of newspaper on the dining room table. In those days, I was then already tall enough to also be able to peer down into the saucepan my mother used to […]