Telstra has secured a $220 million government contract to build the Australian National Cancer Screening Register, a task the Department of Human Services told the government it did not have the capacity to deliver.
The phone company, which is seeking new sources of profits in health services, will turn the national bowel cancer register and eight state and territory based cervical cancer registers into a single digitised cancer screening register.
The deal, which was revealed by Fairfax Media, means Telstra will take possession of personal health records, which are largely in the form of hard copies, to modernise the bowel cancer register and nationalise eight cervical cancer registers.
The contract runs for five years and the register is scheduled to start operating by May 2017.
Until now, a number of smaller state based not-for-profit organisations have been involved in running and compiling the cervical cancer registers. The Department of Human Services maintained the bowel cancer register.
Telstra Health managing director Shane Solomon assured patients about the privacy and security of their medical records.
Mr Solomon said he and professor Ruth Salom, who are running the program, had spent their lives working in healthcare. "We're finely attuned to patient data privacy and patient data security," he said. "We have absolute commitment, we know what happens if people's data is used wrongly.
"In winning the tender, we had to comply, and willingly comply, with the very strict Commonwealth privacy standards – they're in legislation – and we have certainly complied with those and also the security provisions. So the data, for example, has to have a level of accredited security, which we have, and it also has to be stored in Australia, which it is."
The government will continue to own the intellectual property and data kept on the new register.
The Department of Human Services told the government it did not have the capacity to build a national cancer screening register, sources said. The government put out a public tender that closed last October 8.
Telstra Health will bring together four of the businesses it has acquired, including Emerging Systems, Dr Foster, Argus and HealthConnex, to digitalise a national register, which will include things such as consumer portals and SMS nudging to remind patients to be screened and follow up on results.
"In bowel cancer screening there's only 30 per cent of Australians who are in the target population for screening that actually take up the screening," Mr Solomon said.
"The whole idea of this is to use technology to prompt people to be screened, which saves lives, but also to make sure that the outcome of that screening is followed up by whatever subsequent care and treatment is needed."
Mr Solomon said that while Telstra was focusing on building the national register for bowel and cervical cancer, it would also like to add other forms of cancer screening to the register.
"Certainly we have an eye on the potential of other registries, not just in Australia, but globally, to be brought into the digital age," he said.
"If you look at melanomas, for example, the technology around even taking pictures and being able to analyse that is advancing globally quite quickly."
