Magentus has introduced an interoperable e-requesting capability that allows digital pathology requests to move between Australia’s three largest private pathology providers – Sonic Healthcare, Australian Clinical Labs and Healius Pathology Network.
The Digital Patient Choice initiative enables structured requests sent through Genie or Gentu to be processed across competing pathology networks, while preserving clinical data and allowing specialists to track requests through to result delivery.
It means that, for the first time, digital pathology requests will be easily portable between private providers in Australia, adding structured data exchange, real-time tracking and reduced transcription risk.
The capability is part of the Magentus eRequests platform, which augments paper pathology and radiology request forms with a structured digital workflow available to two-thirds of Australia’s specialists through the Genie and Gentu practice management platforms.
With Sonic Healthcare, Australian Clinical Labs and Healius Pathology network now all taking part, the digital portability capability will cover the majority of specialist-initiated private pathology requests nationally.
Magentus Head of Strategic Partnerships Michael Strachan said, “Patients have always had the right to take a request to any provider. What we’ve done is extend that same choice into the digital pathway and in doing so, improved the process. When a digital request moves between providers, the clinical data arrives intact. There’s no re-keying from a printed form, no risk of transcription errors, and referring specialists can track the request from start to finish regardless of where the patient is tested.
“Sometimes the closest collection centre isn’t the provider named on the request, and that’s enough to delay a test or put someone off altogether. With portability, a patient can walk into a participating centre with a request from another provider and have it processed there and then. That’s a better experience, and it’s how the system should work.”
How it works
Magentus says when a specialist sends a digital pathology request through Genie or Gentu, the patient receives a notification from the diagnostic provider with their testing details and a barcode token for their request. That token is recognisable at any participating collection centre. The receiving laboratory’s systems read the request data directly: no phone calls, no re-entering information, no paper.
For referring specialists, the eRequests platform tracks every request from creation through to result delivery, regardless of which laboratory ultimately processes the test.
The standards that make it possible
Portability between competing providers depends on two things: a shared technical standard for how requests are structured and exchanged, and a shared clinical language so that a test ordered by one laboratory means the same thing when it arrives at another.
The technical standard is AU eRequesting Release 1.0, published by HL7 Australia and supported by the Government-funded Sparked FHIR Accelerator program.
Magentus’s eRequests platform, in production since 2023, has a close alignment with the published standard, reflecting the same design patterns. Magentus is actively working toward full conformance as the standard matures through its trial-use phase.
The shared clinical language is the RCPA’s SPIA pathology requesting terminology list, now adopted across participating providers. Without that common terminology, a test ordered by one provider’s system could be ambiguous or misinterpreted by another. With it, cross-provider processing becomes feasible and safe.
Dr Andy Bond, Interoperability Architect at Magentus, said, “This demonstrates what open standards can achieve when industry and government invest together. The requesting standard wasn’t designed in isolation, it was shaped by real clinical data from production systems, then refined through years of industry scrutiny and testing. The result is a specification the whole sector helped build and the whole sector can use.”
Magentus is now working with radiology partners to extend the same model into diagnostic imaging, applying the same combination of open standards, shared terminology, and cross-provider portability to radiology requests.
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