The Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) will digitise more than 40 million patient records stored on almost obsolete microfiche archive equipment between 1975 and 1984 before the government’s Medicare scheme was introduced.
Some $576.2 million will be provided to use ICT to improve access and improve portfolio business within the Department of Human Services (DHS) agencies Centrelink, Medicare and the Child Support Agency under the 2011-2012 federal budget.
The impending merger of Medicare Australia and Centrelink under new legislation will not trample Australians' privacy according to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).
Medicare Australia has launched a new online service enabling customers to claim doctor’s consultation fees online and reduce the time taken to claim benefits manually at their local branch.
Medicare Australia has reached an agreement with e-health vendors surrounding a legal blackhole in developer agreements signed for use of individual healthcare identifiers, with hopes a revised license to be released in the coming week will encourage wider use of the identifiers in clinical software.
The Department of Human Services has pushed back requests to in-source the infrastructure of smaller government agencies due to staffing issues and the sheer amount of work, following a recent in-sourcing agreement with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.
Centrelink has made the decision to bring together several telecommunication contracts including telephony services, carriage services, managed contact centre and video conferencing.
The Federal Government is embarking on a major reform of the agency responsible for Centrelink and Medicare, flagging considerable IT changes as a result.
Medicare is aiming to up the security and privacy capabilities of several of its core internal systems responsible for supporting secure transactions between health providers and the agency.
A former head of Australia's failed $1.1 billion Access Card said the project crashed because of the then Howard government “obsession” with delivering a mandatory single identity card, rather than back-end efficiency.
IBM has signed a one year extension to its contract with Medicare for the provision of IT infrastructure services.