The outcomes experienced by the HL7 community in Australia has clearly demonstrated that the active contribution of experts at HL7 Working Meetings is the most successful approach to achieve the HL7 Standards required for Australia.  The involvement in HL7 Working Meetings based on contributions rather than representation and directly resulted in Australia’s capability to engage in international informatics standards development.

The continuity of "hands-on" participation and contribution to HL7 Working Meetings is a key factor for successful contribution to HL7 and for maximising the benefit to users of HL7 in Australia.  Australia has over the last few years developed a very effective approach of active participation in the global standards development while at the same time intensively implementing and using the very standards it has helped develop. The tangible benefits of active technical participation are two-fold:
1. the ability to substantially influence and change the global HL7 Standards to accommodate unique Australian cultural and healthcare structural requirements.
2. substantial benefit to local industry by removing export barriers as the standards they are designing to are virtually identical to the local standards.

Some of the achievements of Australian participation have been:

- Inclusion of Aboriginal patient identification and naming requirements  There are frequent cases were a patient will use multiple names for tribal or religious reasons.  For the purpose of a longitudinal health record, these multiple names and the context of their use needs to be recorded. This capability was proposed and lobbied by successive Australian delegations and is formally included from HL7 V2.4 onwards.

- Establishment of a Community-Based Health Services committee within HL7 Global  When Australian experts compared the areas of HL7 messaging with the agreed Australian needs, the lack of messaging standards for use between community-based health services providers was identified.  A proposal for the formation of a Community-based Health Services Special Interest Group put forward to the HL7 Global Board and approved in 2000.  This Working Group has been active since then and has written substantial content to HL7 V2.x chapter 11 "Patient Referral" and chapter 12 "Patient Care".  The Working Group is mirrored in Australia by Standards Australia working group IT-014-06-06.

- Pathology Referrals to Reference Laboratories

- Pathology Report Addressing and Routing  In the context of developing the Pathology Messaging Handbook (Standards Australia HB 262), the IT-014-06-05 working group identified a lack of functionality in HL7 V2.4 concerning the routing of pathology result messages to individual doctors, in particular to "copy-to" doctors.  Through submissions and subsequent arguing of the Australian use-case in the Orders/Observations and Control/Query Technical Committees, an existing data item was enhanced and four new data items added.  This success now allows the addressing and routing of reports from HL7 V2.5 onwards as per the Australian requirements without any local modifications to systems.

- Service-Oriented Architecture - Australia was instrumental in supporting the set-up of the HSSP Web Services Project

The Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing has generously provided a number of discretionary grants to part-fund the continuity of Australian expert participation which:
• Ensures that Australian health systems requirements (eg. NEHTA and/or jurisdictions) are factored into the global HL7 standards development
• Enables the representation of Australia's e-Health agenda in the direction-setting and decision-making of HL7 Global
• Facilitates high-level HL7 capacity-building in Australia through education and training
• Provides international exposure for the Australian health IT industry
• Develops opportunities for international collaboration
• Provides opportunities for Australian experts working on e-health projects to exchange with colleagues working on similar projects internationally

Until September 2006, HL7 Australia has administered travel cost grants under the Travel Grant Guidelines agreed with the Department of Health and Ageing and approved by the HL7 Australia Board.  Since then the Commonwealth travel funding has been administered by Standards Australia.  The part-funding covers travel, accommodation and meeting registration only.

Note: Experts part-funded by DoHA grants are indicated with an asterisk.

HL7 Working Meeting - San Antonio, USA (January 12 - 18, 2003) Working Meeting Program Australian/NZ Experts: Heath Frankel*, Grahame Grieve, Dick Harding*, Sam Heard*, Michael Legg*, Peter MacIsaac, Mike Rochow, David Rowed*, Klaus Veil*, Max Walker and Stephen Chu (New Zealand)
Australia and New Zealand joined forces for further development of the discharge-referral message specification and supporting models.   The HL7 Board will submit HL7 V2.4 as a global standard to ISO TC215.  The 4th International Affiliates Meeting will be in Daegu, Sth. Korea.
Working Meeting Report - Summary
Working Meeting Report - S. Heard Working Meeting Report - K. Veil Working Meeting Report - D. Harding	Working Meeting Report - M. Legg Working Meeting Report - H. Frankel Working Meeting Report - D. Rowed Keep up-to-date with the latest HL7 News & Tools: Remember this site: Computer Problems? BEST Free PC Error Scan - Repair    We recommend: Spyware Doctor    Use Firefox for better browsing!