The federal government’s Department of Health and Ageing is seeking information from suppliers in preparation for the upcoming national health reform enterprise data warehouse (NHR EDW) program.
The EDW program is a component of the wider $16 billion national health reform agenda that is being developed by the government and was announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard this week.
According to the department, the EDW program goals are to “build the ICT capability for national reform stakeholders”.
The stakeholders include the Department of Health and Ageing, the Independent Hospital Pricing Authority, the National Health Performance Authority, the National Health Funding Body and the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care.
Key deliverables are to build an ICT capability which is extensible over time to provide access to data to states and territories, and other agencies, as part of the health reform agenda.
Compliance with “rigorous privacy and security standards” is also a stated goal.
NSW Health is also in the middle of its own transformation program, which may eventually result in better information sharing with federal Health and Ageing upon completion of this program.
To deliver the program Health and Ageing will not look to build more data centre capacity, but focus on the systems and software to build the data warehouse.
Future requests for tender will cover three streams: an enterprise data warehouse platform, system integration services and an ongoing managed service for the NHR EDW system; a business intelligence suite of tools and data submission portal; and a panel of specialist data warehousing and business intelligence service providers.
Tenders also won’t include network communications infrastructure.
The department is inviting interested parties to attend an industry briefing in Canberra next week to provide more information on the upcoming tenders. The briefing will include information on the planned engagement with industry and a summary of the business details and objectives.
The NHR EDW is slated for completion by June 30, 2012.
