Mr. Derek Tierney:

Correct. I would say the wider primary care settings. It is predominantly paper based and we do not have any maturity around digital systems, digital technology or data collection systems in our community settings. Therefore, there is a gap. While our longer term plan is to roll out a national electronic health record, we recognise there is a need to deliver some capability to the community in the interim. This is what community connect is. It is a solution to bridge a gap in time until we get to the final state, which is an enterprise national electronic health system. We have now commenced a programme where we are using an existing framework to start to deploy an existing solution into the community, into mental health in the first instance, widening to palliative care and then widening it again to wider community services. The vendor is currently delivering a solution for us. I would say it is a mid-tier vendor and we are exploiting that framework to roll that out into the community, to bridge a gap and fill a need they have.

We do not have the luxury to be able to pick and choose. We are not fully funded to make decisions for everything. We have to standardise our approach and we have to exploit existing frameworks and technology where we can. Part of our job is to understand what we have, whether it delivers capability and how we can use that within the system.