News release

Alfred Health pioneering AIR integration

21 March 2023

Leading the state in their integration with the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR), Alfred Health is contributing to the seamless integration of vaccine records nationally. The AIR acts as a unifying system supporting the tracking and rollout of vaccines across the country, while enabling the federal government to monitor both immunisation levels and individual immunisation status, where required.

The project was prompted by the National Cabinet’s endorsement of the Australian COVID-19 Vaccination Policy on 13 November 2020 with requirements to upload COVID-19, influenza, and, eventually, almost all vaccines nationally to a central repository where information can be shared with GPs, clinicians, and the patient themselves via My Health Record.

Oracle Health (formerly Cerner) partnered with Alfred Health and the Department of Health Victoria to create an embedded clinical workflow. The additional effort required to complete the project was minimal, yet it created a technical solution with flexibility to support the variety of systems in place in Victoria. The initial implementation was completed in September 2022.

“Ensuring patients and their healthcare providers have real-time access to vaccination records is critical. This important and complex work was able to be implemented through a collaboration between Oracle Health, the Victorian Department of Health, and Alfred Health” said Erica Tong, chief pharmacy information officer, Alfred Health.

This development is the first use of the HL7 VXU transaction to generate outbound messages in Australia for Oracle Health. The data to be transferred is captured as a byproduct of the normal ordering and administration workflows, and is passed onto the state where the message is transformed to meet the AIR requirements. Once transformed, the message is securely transferred to the AIR and success or error messages are passed back to the medical record where clinicians can make adjustments, if necessary.

Philip Loya, lead business developer at Oracle Health in APAC, notes, “One big benefit of using the HL7 VXU standard and the Department of Health Victoria doing the transformation work is that we now have a system that will work with both Oracle Health and a number of other non-Oracle systems around the state, while also retaining flexibility to support the enterprise architecture strategies in other Oracle Health markets, such as New South Wales and Queensland.”

Alfred Health’s recent uplift to the functionality significantly enhanced AIR error management workflow allowing for corrections to be sent immediately.

“We’re proud of the partnership that was fostered between Alfred Health, Department of Health Victoria, and Oracle Health and congratulate both parties on the success of the AIR project. We’re happy to have been able to support the local needs of our clients in Australia” said Julie Hoare, vice president and regional general manager for Oracle Health in the APAC region.