8th HL7 Australia Conference - July 28/29, 2005 Melbourne

495 Collins St., Melbourne, Australia

1 July 2005 marked the official start of one of Australia’s most important companies, one that is funded by state and federal governments but whose role will be to encourage investment by both public and private healthcare sectors in e-Health. This new company is the National eHealth Transition Authority, NeHTA.  To achieve its role in a timely manner it needs to be influential and to define the specifications for health sector investment in e-Health in a clear and meaningful way.

Dr Ian Reinecke, NeHTA’s CEO was quoted last month as saying he is not sure whether his company will be recommending whether Australia should go with HL7 or openEHR/European based standards!  Many would be surprised to see the two compared in this way, whilst others hold the view that if we have a standard record architecture (openEHR) then the need for messaging and terminology/vocabulary standards will disappear or be much simplified?

Does the official commencement of NeHTA signal the demise of HL7 in Australia?

These discussions are not new, nor is Australia known for being shy when it comes to debating where others are too afraid to tread. What is the way forward for those currently implementing HL7 Version 2 messages?  Should they continue business as usual or is now the time to embrace radical change? Indeed will the change be radical? What will the next generation of complex clinical records, knowledge management and communication requirements require? Will HL7 or openEHR still be relevant when the 2012 Olympics are held in London or will they too have evolved into something else?

These are the issues that will be addressed later this month at the 8^th HL7 Australia Conference.

The program for this special HL7 meeting brings together Australian and international speakers who have been active in designing, refining, critiquing and challenging aspects of the HL7 suite of messaging and EHR standards and the openEHR model and associated archetype methodology.

• Sam Heard, Co-Chair HL7 Electronic Health Records Technical Committee; CEO and Clinical Director, Ocean Informatics
• Charlie McCay - Chair HL7 Implementation Committee; Chair HL7 UK
• Lloyd McKenzie - Co-Chair HL7 Modeling and Methodology Technical Committee; member HL7 Canada
• Mead Walker;  HL7 implementation consultant
• Graham Grieve:  Kestral Computing, HL7 Co-Chair Modelling and Methodology
• Klaus Veil:  Chair HL7 Australia; and member HL7 international board of directors.
• Peter MacIsaac and Michael Legg:  Joint coordinators of HL7/HISA/IHE demonstration

The focus of this conference is on providing a very practical understanding of the HL7 V3 and openEHR methods together with an important opportunity to debate the details of these concepts with the experts in order to understand how they do, can or will fit together. Topics to be covered include:

• Messaging and EHRs – technical and functional perspectives
• Boundaries for various system connectivity solutions
• HL7 v2.x, v3 and openEHR implementation strategies

Building upon recent HL7 meetings which saw the introduction of a new strategy for implementing standards in complex environments – Integrating the HealthCare Enterprise (IHE), this meeting will also include a dress rehearsal for the first Australian HISA/HL7/IHE interoperability demonstration to be run at HIC 2005.

To view the conference program and to register go to http://www.hl7.org.au/2005-MEL.htm

Register today or express your intention to be there by contacting our conference organiser on hazelcondon@bigpond.com.  It is always OK to turn up on the day (but it does make our life much more difficult)!

Look forward to seeing you there!

Evelyn Hovenga

HL7 Australia

Chair Education Technical Committee.