How to create awareness and ensure broad dissemination of health informatics standards.

There is a range of organisations with responsibility for information standards development within Australia. These include Standards Australia, which is formally linked to the International Organisation for Standards (ISO), the National Health Information Management Group, which deals with the government sector and several statutory organisations such as the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the National Centre for Classification in Health. The different constituencies involved with each of these organisations, the scope of healthcare informatics and the rate of organisational and technological change in the industry present a significant challenge in ensuring that the standard setting process is highly visible, responsive and capable of demonstrating its value through effective implementation. Creating awareness and ensuring broad dissemination of healthcare informatics standards is a key component in meeting this challenge. This can operate at a number of levels from strategic to operational. At the strategic level, it requires active engagement and commitment of the key decision-makers, both political and professional. This may require directly lobbying and promoting the benefits of standardisation to those decision-makers but can be achieved even more effectively by creating industry awareness and demand through carefully targeted presentations on the impact of standards to broader health industry forums. At the tactical level, the standards development medium itself can be used to engage and gain commitment from government, professionals, vendors and the health industry by operating as an inclusive, open and effective process. At the operational level, there is the opportunity for much more efficient use of technology to create awareness of both these processes and their outcomes. The establishment in Australia of a web enabled National Health Information Knowledge base built around ISO standards is one example of the type of development which will assist in the acceleration of awareness of standards and standardisation, which is needed to cope with the increasing demand.