The GP practice pilot as conducted does not use any integrated IT system. It uses a very simple standalone system for generating our enhanced reports on paper with data being entered manually at the GP practice rather than being automatically extracted from other IT systems. Also, we have not provided infrastructure for transmission or storage of the reports.
Future IT integration would enable enhanced pathology reports to be created without separate manual entry of pathology results. It is likely this will be done using the HL7 version 2.3 or 2.4 standard formats used by many current medical IT systems. Eventually there will most likely be a move to HL7 version 3, which is substantially different to versions 2.x, but the timetable for this transition is not clear.
A key component of IT integration will be the mechanism for identifying patients. The many current medical IT systems support unique identifiers for patient. In order for them to be integrated, some support multiple identifiers (for example, some pathology laboratory IT systems support multiple identifiers used by different hospital IT systems). NEHTA has developed a set of standards for the national Healthcare Identifiers Service and it would be advisable to support these standards, even if other identifiers also have to be supported as an interim measure.