Chris Pearce posted this to a closed email list yesterday. I think it provides a useful insight into plans for the Australian Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) that is not otherwise obvious. The Documents he refers to are two NEHTA specifications that are being developed in consultation with professional bodies, related to the PCEHR Shared Health Summary and PCEHR Event Summary. With his permission:
An overview that you might find helpful in making a bit more sense of the documents. If you need more detail, you may need to go back to the concept of operations document.
The Shared Health Summary (SHS) intended to be a curated, validated record. Initially it was meant to come from general practice, but in the consultation process this has been modified - and is now the role of a 'nominated provider', who must be a health professional who is capable of understanding the continuing, comprehensive care aspect, medications and the like. It will require a mutual consent process.
The event summary was initially designed to pick up where the SHS (which is fixed at a point of time) left off - so if you had something that would alter the SHS, you could put it in the Event summary - so for example- GP loads SHS, then refers patient to specialist who diagnoses diabetes - so loads event summary with diagnosis of diabetes, Rx of metformin. The actual scope is part of the consultation process that ACHI is now involved in.
The third piece of the puzzle is a thing called the consolidated view - which is designed to bring the information together in a meaningful way - SHS, event summaries, discharge summaries, other clinical documents. Thus in the above example a third party would see a list of the current conditions that would include the ones from the SHS (clearly identified as to provenance) along with the ones from an event summary (and from consumer entered data.
But, it does mean that one can have a health summary (uncurated, or really curated at a different level) 'view' built up over time without the shared health summary.
Author: Associate Professor Christopher Pearce PhD MFM MBBS FRACGP FACRRM FAICD FACHI Director of Research, Melbourne East General Practice Network Adjunct Associate Professor in General Practice, Monash University Visiting Fellow, Australian National University Clinical Lead, National E-Health Transitional Authority