Do You Think Standards Australia Is Behaving In Conformance With Its Memorandum of Understanding With HL7 and IT-14?

Here is the HL7 Australia Mission Statement and The MOU.

HL7 Australia Mission HL7 Australia is an open, not-for-profit, democratic organisation that supports the HL7 user community by:
Co-ordinating and championing the development and implementation of the Australian and global family of HL7 standards	Developing skills and knowledge exchange amongst members and the wider informatics community	Promoting HL7 as the most effective standard for systems interoperability, EDI message interfaces and information management in healthcare

HL7 Australia strives to collaborate with Standards Australia and the IT14 Health Informatics Committee to best achieve this Mission.

Statement of Collaboration

 Principles of Collaboration

HL7 Australia recognises that the development and implementation of health informatics standards in Australia must involve the active collaboration with Standards Australia, and that there is value in clarifying the broad roles and responsibilities of each organisation.

HL7 Australia will:
•  Maintain open lines of communication
•  Collaborate in a spirit of mutual appreciation, respect and openness
•  Seek pragmatic solutions to create a series of HL7 standards for health care communications

HL7 Australia re-affirms that:
•  we support SA and IT14 in their role as the national standards developer.
•  we coordinate Australia’s activity in the international HL7 Working Group and related meetings.
•  in areas not covered by IT14, we will facilitate Australia’s input to HL7 standards development.
•  we provide education and events relating to HL7.
•  we encourage complete openness in the sharing of technical documents.

 Approved by the HL7 Australia Board, May 2003 (confirmed by SA and IT14 June 2003)

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Here is the link:

http://www.hl7.org.au/docs/Statement%20of%20Collaboration%20-%20SA.htm

It would seem to me on the basis of the last two blogs in the area found here:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/the-australian-e-health-standards.html

And here:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/if-you-thought-issues-with-e-health.html

That we are just not seeing any mutual appreciation, respect and openness from SA to either HL7 and IT14 Health Informatics Committee.

A quick look at the current list of e-Health Standards found here:

http://www.e-health.standards.org.au/Home/Publications.aspx

Will show just how much of  Standards Australia’s work flows from and is based on HL7 work.

One really must wonder just what Australian HL7 Members and their Board are thing about all these shenanigans. I suspect there must be a lot behind the scenes discussion regarding who needs to do what to get things back on the rails.

I continue to hear of a lot of unhappiness from all over on this.

All this reminds me a little of the MOU on Compliance, Conformance and Assessment (CCA) which kicked off with a lot of noise and now seems to be pretty quiet.

See here:

http://ehealthcca.com.au/about-cca/what-is-cca

It is odd that there has been no news update on the site in over a year - rather like the NEHTA Publications Listings. See here:

http://www.nehta.gov.au/media-centre/nehta-publications

Last entry in August last year.

One has to wonder are things just falling to bits.

David.