WHAT'S NEW

DCA and Communicare, have joining forces to support health and community services organisations to improve the quality of service to healthcare consumers.

“The acquisition is a strong strategic fit for DCA”, say Declan Ryan,DCA’s Chief executive Officer. “Communicare provides further expansion into the community health services sector and a strong presence in Western Australia. It’s also an excellent fit with DCA’s existing health and community business division and enables both our companies to increase its service delivery capability”

The focus of the alliance is directed to supporting people to remain out of hospitals and institutions, so that they can be cared for with dignity and within their community.   Communicare is currently Australia’s leading supplier of software to the indigenous and remote rural health population.DCA’s product TCM supports community based service delivery to the aged, disabled and mentally ill, and its product Argus  provides secure messaging  to support secure communication of electronic health records.  The combined organisation will be responsible for over 300 community care organisations represented in every Australian state and territory, as well as supporting electronic messaging with over 7500 GPs, specialists and allied health providers.

Click here to read the Press Release.

DCA has leveraged its expertise in the Human Services Directory and secure messaging projects to submit a specification for an international standard for health services and provider directories. The standards work is being sponsored by the Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP), a collaborative effort between the two standards organisations Health Level 7 (HL7) and the Object Management Group (OMG).

Led by DCA Solutions Architect Brian Postlethwaite and Development Director Steve Toal, the draft specification for Services Directory, called ServD, was submitted to the OMG in February 2012 and was reviewed at the March OMG technical meeting in Washington D.C.

Non-OMG members can review the specification on the HSSP wiki site:

 http://hssp-provider-services-directory.wikispaces.com/home

“The directory used to locate providers of health and related services is an essential component of e-health infrastructure” said Peter Young, DCA’s Executive General Manager of Health and Community Services. “It provides two purposes; firstly a discovery capability that web users and conformant applications can use to find and locate services, including information such as opening hours, accessibility, eligibility criteria, and map locations. Secondly, it can hold information required to enable secure transmission of encrypted health data. It is critical that confidential patient/client information is delivered to the right place and appropriately secured”.

The ServD specification defines the interfaces that applications and web portals can use to search, retrieve and maintain service and provider information. It includes the data that will be returned to the application, and differentiates publicly available information from that which is secured to authenticated users. It also defines the mechanism by which multiple directories can be linked together via a common index.

“The purpose of making the specification an open standard is that anyone creating a health application or portal can use a common mechanism to find and retrieve service and provider information. This dramatically reduces software development costs and simplifies implementation on a regional or national scale”, said Mr Young.

DCA has ten year’s experience in building and maintaining service directories, having worked with the Victorian Human Services Directory, the Northern Territory Continuity of Care Project, and the National GP After Hours Call service.