e-Health bill introduced to parliament

By Liz Tay on Feb 12, 2010 6:14 AM
Filed under Strategy

Privacy Act to be amended.

The Federal Government has introduced a bill to Parliament will allow every Australian to be issued with electronic identification.

If passed, the bill will see unique 16 digit numbers created for individuals and health care providers by the middle of this year.

The Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) is a step towards an e-health system that will eventually give citizens comprehensive electronic health records that can be used by multiple healthcare providers.

Last year, the National Health and Hospital Reforms Commission (NHHRC) also recommended that the e-health system allow individuals to determine which practitioners their information can be shared with, and how their records will be stored, backed-up and retrieved.

"The government is currently undertaking the most important overhaul of our health system since the introduction of Medicare 25 years ago," said Nicola Roxon, Minister for Health and Ageing.

"This bill establishes the healthcare identifiers, without which there cannot be an integrated, consistent, e-health system in Australia."

Roxon said that safeguards would be put in place so that minimal demographic information would be collected and no clinical information would be held by the service operator.

Only authorised healthcare providers would be able to access the records of their existing patients, and independent regulators would manage a "robust complaints handling framework", she said.

According to the bill, minor amendments would be made to the Privacy Act to ensure that the Federal Privacy Commissioner can act against any individual or company that misuses an individual's healthcare identifier.

5 comments in this discussion

"I hope that this ID would be the one to replace those with medicare, tax file number, Drivers license number and whatever services coming in the future."

By laman

Tags

ehealth, government, roxby, parliament, ihi, privacy, identifier, medicare, reform

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Comments: 5

ITrant Feb 12, 2010 9:11 AM	An identity number at last! Why is it Labor gets away with things conservative governments could only dream of? Privacy act indeed! What was insufficient about the Medicare number again, remind me? This is terrorism legislation all over again. It always illegal to blow up buildings, but a "great" excuse to grant police services the extraordinary powers (decimating civil liberties) that they had been demanding for two decades.
Munners Feb 12, 2010 9:16 AM	Wonder if this will cover prescriptions too (i.e. track how much is spent on them) for the Medicare Safety Net (EMSN). There are several medical services that are now capped (e.g vascular surgeons, obstetricians and providers of artificial reproductive technology such as IVF specialists). I guess this would make it easier for the Govt to track these.
deonast Feb 12, 2010 9:40 AM	So we will have a medicare number, e-health number, tax file number, Drivers license number and whatever service they want to create next will have another number. Great to see life is getting simpler not. No ITrant this is not terrorism legislation over again. Disparate databases and systems lead to loss of information and inability to correlate it for both positive and negative purposes. We need to ensure that the legislation works for our benefit and systems have adequate security.
Ace Feb 12, 2010 11:01 AM	If you are old enough, have kids etc, you will know how hopeless the Medicare system is. Good thing not to use it's antique numbering system. Good thing also to separate tax, license (which is state, not fed) and e-health numbers. Increases privacy through separation of private information. The e-Health number id thing has been in the works for many many years. However, what is different now is that people are more 'connected' than ever, and are better able to see the benefits than in the past. The id is one thing, the sharing of health info is another. It's a very difficult thing to legislate well so that the right people have access to information, while individual privacy is maintained. While having a central database of all health records might be technically preferable, it obviously hugely risky from a privacy point, and opens the door to abuse of the system. I suppose the same could be said about tax information, but health is really a whole different thing. So, the method used to share health information becomes the key problem.
laman Feb 12, 2010 1:11 PM	I hope that this ID would be the one to replace those with medicare, tax file number, Drivers license number and whatever services coming in the future.