Electronic Medication Management system (EMM)
Definition:
The utilisation of electronic systems to facilitate and enhance the communication of a prescription or medicine order, aiding the choice, administration, and supply of a medicine through knowledge and decision support, and providing a robust audit trail for the entire medicines use process.
National standards and specifications
General requirements
Cyber security
The software must demonstrate adherence to the ‘Essential 8’ cyber security principles.
Privacy
Data collected about an individual by medical software is likely to constitute health information (which is sensitive information, a category of personal information that generally has a higher degree of privacy protection than other personal information) under relevant federal, state and territory privacy legislation. (e.g. Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 (NSW) etc).
The software must demonstrate adherence to relevant Federal, State or Territory privacy legislation.
Applicable Federal legislation is the Privacy Act 1988 (cth). Details of the relevant State and Territory based legislation is contained in the State requirements section.
Core requirements
Standards for identification
The software must:
- integrate Individual Healthcare Identifiers (IHIs) into the local patient record
- allow for the storing of Healthcare Provider Identifier-Organisation (HPI-O) in the local system and associate or link them with locally stored healthcare provider organisation details
- allow for the storing of healthcare provider identifier-individual (HPI-I) in the local system and associate or link them with locally stored healthcare provider individuals’ details.
- be capable of managing the physical medicinal products using the unique identification as specified by the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Therapeutic Goods Order(s) 91 and Therapeutic Goods Order 106.
The system should:
- support person and provider identification in healthcare National Best Practice Data Set.
Australian Core Data for Interoperability (AUCDI)
The software should:
support the use of AU CDI Release 1
Note: The focus of the AUCDI Release 1 is the representation of the clinical content necessary for each of the data groups identified within the Release 1 scope. These data groups include Adverse reaction risk summary (allergies and intolerances), Problem/Diagnosis summary, Procedure completed event, Vaccination administration event (immunisations), Vital signs, measurements and other biomarkers for chronic disease and preventative health with an initial scope of cardiovascular risk calculation and diabetes care, Medication use statement, Sex and gender, and Encounter information necessary to provide clinical context. Development is continuing to enhance AUCDI, at which time the detail in this section will be updated.
Standards for data sharing
The software should:
- support the authoring and consumption of clinical documents in Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) formats.
- support HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®)-compliant API as the base standard communication process
- support an API compliant with HL7 version 2.4.1 and the ORM specification as a minimum
Standards for terminology, code sets and classifications
The system must:
- be capable of capturing or storing medication related clinical information using the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT)
National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) Standards:
The software must:
- support compliance with the Medication Safety Standard.
- support compliance to the Communicating for Safety Standard.
Note: Additional consideration of National Safety and Quality Standards is recommended to ensure systems support safety and the highest quality care.
Other National Standards
The system must:
- support Active Ingredient Prescribing.
The system should:
- support Australian Standards AS ISO/IEC 15459.4:2023 Information technology — Automatic identification and data capture techniques — Unique identification, Part 4: Individual products and product packages and AS ISO/IEC 15418:2023 Information technology — Automatic identification and data capture techniques — GS1 Application Identifiers and ASC MH10 Data Identifiers and maintenance to enable data capture related to products.
Future considerations may include requirements related to traceability of medicines as referenced in Therapeutic Goods Order 106.
Where the system is used within a residential aged care facility, the system should:
- support adherence to the guiding principles for medication management in residential aged care facilities
Connections to National Systems
HI Service:
If the software is expected to deal with healthcare identifiers (e.g. in a hospital environment) then it must:
- be able to discover and validate Individual Healthcare Identifiers (IHI) via the Healthcare Identifier (HI) Service
My Health Record
The software should:
- be able to access the My Health Record for the purposes of viewing a patient record
- be able to upload an electronic Prescription record
- support patient instruction not to upload
Conformance
The software must:
- conform with the Electronic Prescribing Conformance Framework.
Where the system is required to connect to national infrastructure, the system should:
- have production access to the My Health Record
- have production access to the Health Identifiers Service
State-based requirements
The following state-based requirements should be considered based on your location.
All requirements must be supported based on location.
ACT | NSW | QLD | NT | SA | TAS | VIC | WA |
TBC | Medication Handling in NSW Public Health Facilities Support adherence to Poisons and Therapeutic Goods Regulation
NSW Ministry of Health TG184 ‘Criteria for Issuing Non-handwritten (Computer Generated) Prescriptions’ | TBC | TBC | TBC | Safe medication administration
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TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC |
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