*REPOSTED ON 12th MARCH WITH UPDATE TO ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION
Pioneer of online healthcare booking joins effort to support Australian Government Department of Health’s end-to-end COVID-19 vaccination solution
HealthEngine has joined the national COVID-19 vaccination rollout effort after being selected by the Australian Government Department of Health to build the Commonwealth booking platform as part of the COVID-19 Vaccination Information and Booking Service.
The platform will be launched by the federal government in the coming weeks to support the multi-phased vaccination rollout as part of the DoH’s end-to-end COVID-19 vaccination solution that will allow patients to locate and book appointments with designated vaccine clinics via a Service Finder based on the HealthDirect-run National Health Services Directory (NHSD).
*The Commonwealth booking platform is a standalone online booking platform for COVID vaccination clinics to support the management of their vaccination bookings. This service will improve accessibility of vaccines by increasing the number of appointments available to consumers online. It is for use in limited circumstances:
- 1. It can only be used by clinics when they don’t already have a booking service provider
- 2. It is for COVID-19 vaccination appointments only, and time-limited to the vaccine rollout;
- 3. It will not be integrated with existing practice management software in clinics.
The Commonwealth booking platform will be available to approved health service providers who are part of the national COVID-19 vaccine rollout including GP clinics, pharmacies and State-run vaccination clinics. The HealthEngine designed solution is suitable as a standalone booking option that complies with government requirements around accessibility, privacy and security. This option will help clinics to ‘get online’ quickly for COVID vaccinations, where they don’t already have an online booking system. Clinics with existing booking systems *need to continue using their systems, to leverage the benefits of a fully integrated booking system.
This work builds on HealthEngine’s experience as a pioneer of healthcare online bookings in Australia with a robust and scalable system being developed by modifying HealthEngine’s proven platform. It’s being fast tracked to meet challenging deadlines to contribute to the DoH’s greater COVID management effort.
“Given the very tight timeframes involved and the complexity of such a project, we are under no illusions about the challenge we have signed up to. However, the opportunity to support a historic public health effort involving millions of Australians by assisting the Federal government with a very important piece of national digital health infrastructure, was one we simply couldn’t pass up,” said Dr Marcus Tan, HealthEngine CEO, founder and medical director. “We’re honoured to be selected by the Department of Health for the job.”
Dr Tan said, “We were humbled by and grateful for the tremendous support we received from the broader health and technology sectors with our bid to perform this work. These included written references from practice customers large and small across the spectrum of health specialties, organisations that confirmed our patient-centred approach and our ability to cooperatively work with ecosystem partners such as Medipass and MedAdvisor to extend future functionality as required. This project is a huge team effort and we’re excited to be an official part of the team.”
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