Concept of Operations: Relating to the introduction of a Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record System
6.1 Introduction
The PCEHR System is a ‘system of systems’, consisting of a number of core services and conformant repositories. As illustrated in Figure 10, the proposed approach will leverage existing foundations, such as the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service, NASH and Clinical Terminologies. The core national services include:- A Participation and Authorisation Service, which stores individuals’ participation preferences and manages access controls to an individual’s PCEHR.
- An Index Service, which records the location(s) of a participating individual’s records in a range of PCEHR-conformant repositories.
- An Audit Service, which audits all activity across the PCEHR System.
- A View Service and a Report Service, which are capable of extracting information from PCEHR-conformant repositories in order to support a range of different ways of viewing and reporting on information.
These services will be complemented by new foundation services that operate alongside the other foundation services, such as the HI Service and NASH.
These new foundation services include:
- A Proof of Record Ownership Service, which can verify that an individual has supplied sufficient information to correctly identify themselves or to verify their relationship with another individual (e.g. parent / child relationships).
- A Template Service, which provides definitions about the types of healthcare information that can be shared via the PCEHR System (and other systems).
- A National Healthcare Provider Service Directory, which is a new directory to provide portal users with a ‘Yellow Pages’ style directory to help locate healthcare providers and organisations.
These infrastructure services will be used to facilitate access via a service coordination layer to a range of PCEHR-conformant repositories. This includes a national repositories service and the capability to link to other independent conformant repositories, such as repositories offered by the Department of Human Services Medicare program, Diagnostic Service Providers, regional operators, State/Territory public health system(s) and other parties.
The PCEHR core services and repositories will be accessible via a range of channels and user systems, including:
- Nationally provided Consumer and Provider-oriented portals, as well as independently provided consumer-oriented conformant portals.
- A call centre for individuals and healthcare provider support.
- A Business-to-Business (B2B) Gateway, to allow a range of systems to access the PCEHR System, such as: clinical systems, systems integrated via a gateway and contracted service providers acting on behalf of healthcare organisations.
- A Report Portal to support operational and evaluation based reporting.
- An Administration Portal and Contact Management Service to aid a range of agents with supporting PCEHR users.
Access to the PCEHR System will be based on Australian and International standards for ensuring interoperability of eHealth systems as well as other relevant specifications.
Figure 10: PCEHR System components
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