The work of health information management professionals is vital to the infrastructure supporting interoperability, standards, terminologies and connected healthcare, the CEO of the Australian Digital Health Agency Amanda Cattermole told delegates at the Health Information Management conference on Monday.
Speaking in Sydney, in her last week at the Agency before joining the Australian Tax Office as its Chief Operating Officer, Ms Cattermole said the success of Australia’s increasingly connected health system would depend on maintaining the quality, integrity and meaning of information as it moved between healthcare providers.
“If that information loses its meaning or its context or its integrity as it moves, then of course connection hasn’t done its job,” she said.
She highlighted the growing importance of health information management professionals in supporting clinical terminologies, coding, governance and data quality as healthcare systems become more interconnected.
“And that is the value of health data. It isn’t that it exists. It is that it can be found, understood and used when it matters.”
Ms Cattermole said collaboration across governments, health services, industry and the health workforce would be essential to realising the benefits of connected healthcare.
“Connecting data is important, but collaboration between people and professionals, all of you in this room, is what is going to make better care,” she said.
The interoperability agenda
Ms Cattermole gave an update on the Agency’s progress in advancing the next phase of Australia’s digital health interoperability agenda. She said the convergence of technology, standards and legislative reforms was creating a significant turning point in how health information is shared and used across Australia’s healthcare system.
Ms Cattermole said the Agency was progressing the transition of My Health Record from its legacy environment to a FHIR-enabled platform, enabling individual clinical data elements to be exchanged and used more effectively.
The transition is intended to make individual clinical data elements easier to find and use, allowing clinicians to locate specific results, medicines or conditions within their workflows rather than searching through entire documents.
“I think that’s why I think we’re at such an inflection point,” Ms Cattermole said.
“We’ve moved beyond debating all of that. We are now really looking on how we make this work consistently, improving conformance, retiring old profiles and moving safely from legacy technologies, going to that new environment.”
“The next step is making that information inside these documents easier to find and use,” she said.
Ms Cattermole also outlined progress on Health Connect Australia. Its first key element, a national provider directory, is moving from pilot towards scaling in 2027.
“It is designed to build the standards, architecture and discovery services needed to find and share information across the system – beyond My Health Record, so right across the system, but of course critically connecting to it so that information can flow, and then tying it all together in a trusted exchange environment that ensures accountability, traceability and security,” Ms Cattermole said.
Health Connect Australia was launched in June 2025, alongside the release of its Strategy, Architecture and Roadmap.
Ms Cattermole said technology and infrastructure development were being reinforced by policy and legislative changes, including the introduction of share by default requirements for pathology and diagnostic imaging reports on 1 July 2026.
She said consumer use of shared information had increased by 94 per cent year on year, while healthcare providers had used shared information more than 207 million times in episodes of care during the past 12 months.
Further policy measures on the horizon include mandatory sharing of chronic condition management plans and medicines information, laying the foundations for a national medicines record.
Interoperability plan
Ms Cattermole said progress was also being made under the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan, with 80 per cent of its actions completed ahead of the plan’s scheduled conclusion.
She said the work of Governments, health services, industry and the health workforce mutually reinforces and builds on itself.
“But for this to be effective, for this to have a system-wide effect, it is the leadership – collaborative, connected leadership seeing this as more than the sum of its parts, that is critical.”
Noting that HIMAA CEO Sallyanne Wissmann is a member of the Council for Connected Care, she said the Council’s job is to steward the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan, as well as leading the work on the National Health Identifiers Roadmap.
