Deloitte to deliver govt's digital health gateway

The Australian Digital Health Agency has announced that Deloitte will deliver the first phase of the modernisation of the national digital health infrastructure.

The contract, awarded following a competitive tender process, is for the Health Information Gateway, a digital health-enabling technology that provides a secure and scalable platform for exchanging and accessing health information, including vaccinations and aged-care data.

Amanda Cattermole, Australian Digital Health Agency CEO, said, “The new Health Information Gateway will reduce costs and technical and operational complexity often faced by healthcare providers by setting in place a single, consolidated gateway with reusable interfaces available to developers. And it requires fewer connections to be developed between healthcare providers and My Health Record and other digital health products and services. This goes a long way to making the sharing of patient information between healthcare providers easier.

“This is why the modernisation of the national digital infrastructure is the Agency’s most important strategic focus for 2021,” she said.

The new gateway will enable the Agency to deploy and manage additional health information repositories and health data exchanges in support of national priorities for healthcare delivery and digitising government services, now and into the future. It will provide improved support for the integration of health information from multiple sources into clinical information systems.

Based on modern web services and standards for health information exchange and clinical terminologies, such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), the new gateway will be able to interoperate with other modern health information exchange technologies from the medical software industry and those already implemented by large healthcare providers such as state and territory health departments.

The gateway will support a range of government authentication mechanisms so that information can be more easily shared across the health ecosystem, while maintaining the right security and controls.

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