IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Video medical consulting from the familiarity of a GP’s rooms was to remove barriers for people having difficulty getting to major cities.

But the federal government announced it will cut Telehealth services to outer metropolitan areas from January next year - meaning Illawarra residents won’t have access.

The app, called "Responder App", was the winner of the App Aid competition, against the apps of nine other leading charities, today.

The app was designed to provide St John volunteers with immediate access to information including tips, checklists and patient treatment guides to help in emergency treatment.

The Gillard government's personally controlled e-health record system, developed by Accenture, contained a staggering 142 risks of which 32 were rated extreme, 77 high and 33 medium.

It took 11 months to hit the first 250,000 as of June 5. This time the government will have about three weeks to repeat the feat.

The government had aimed for half a million Australians with a personally controlled eHealth record by next month.

The rollout of the State Government’s troubled $422 million electronic health records system has been delayed again.

The Government revealed today that the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) will not be implemented at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) before the transition to the new Royal Adelaide Hospital.

The $620 million scheme that links doctors and patients via video-link was the centrepiece of Prime Minister Julia Gillard's 2010 election campaign launch.

It was promised the scheme would give patients outside major cities access to a specialist, with a target of 495,000 consultations by July 2015.

Telstra Health recently announced the purchase of the business assets of Medibank’s Anywhere Healthcare, one of Australia’s specialist telemedicine solutions.

Established by Medibank in 2013, Anywhere Health offers people in regional and remote areas of Australia or people with physical constraint access to specialist medical practitioners and other allied health professionals over video conference.

The increasing number of aged people will place unsustainable stress on established healthcare services and will result in increasing deficits in clinical human resources, the expansion of disease management programs and patient demand for greater self-management.

According to Jan Newland, chief executive officer of General Practice NSW, there will be an increased need for population health data management in order to deal with the region's ehealth agenda, reports TechWorld.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has continued to lobby the government to change its $466.7 million e-health record system to an “opt-out” model, arguing that the current “opt-in” model will undermine the system’s health improvement objectives.

In its submission (PDF) to the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) Bill 2011, the industry body’s president, Steve Hambleton, maintained the current “opt-in” design will undermine the goals of the system, “to reduce the occurrence of adverse medical events and duplication of treatment”.

New laws to give doctors and pharmacists instant access to medical records may pose a risk to human rights by violating privacy.

A parliamentary joint committee on human rights has called on Health Minister Sussan Ley to explain what safeguards are in place to protect Australians' privacy when their health records are uploaded onto a central electronic database, under the new myHealth Record system.

Mukesh Haikerwal, who is the federal government's clinical advisor on e-health, said the HealthSMART program had ''a long tortuous history'' but cost savings would not be made by ditching it, only to start again from scratch to build an electronic system to share patient information in hospitals.

The Age revealed yesterday that the state government was considering abandoning the program, which is five years late and $35 million over budget.

There are no quick wins when it comes to improving public services — technology solutions often fail when the organisational and cultural change is lacking. But the private sector has shown that when data is used well and non-CIO executives become champions, it creates a better customer experience and increased productivity.

While there are “pockets of excellence” within the public sector when it comes to using data to improve customer experience, there is a lot to be learned from the private sector in the way it has done the necessary organisational reform required to back up technology change, says IBM’s Murray Bruce.

The PCEHR project was initially funded in the 2010 Federal Budget to the tune of $466.7 million after years of health industry and technology experts calling for development and national leadership in e-health and health identifier technology to better tie together patients’ records and achieve clinical outcomes. The project is overseen by the Department of Health in coalition with the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA).

Health minister, Tanya Plibersek, and communications minister, senator Stephen Conroy, said the $20.6m program would deliver services to patients in NBN rollout areas and provide feedback on how it and other health care measures could be delivered nationwide.

The government hopes to hit 500,000 registrations by June 30 next year.

Department of Health and Ageing secretary Jane Halton said there had been more than 4000 registrations since the personally controlled e-health record system was launched on July 1.

Dr Chris Mitchell, Head of Adoption, Benefits and Change at the National E-Health Transition Authority, says it is "really important that we prioritise rural Australia" for the roll out of ehealth initiatives and infrastructure such as the National Broadband Network which drives it.

AARNet has unveiled plans to connect hundreds of homes for the first time over the National Broadband Network as part of several research trials it has lined up across the country.

The connections will mark the first time the research internet service provider has directly served broadband to residents that are not staff or students of a university.

Its private network has typically been used to connect universities, research institutions and more recently TAFE colleges and some high schools with high-speed broadband.

Using a series of digital test beds.

The Australian Digital Health Agency is set to test new models of healthcare that are enabled or enhanced by the forthcoming personal e-health record.

The operator of the record system said it is looking to fund a series of test bed projects in partnership with industry and academia to feed into the creation of digitally-enabled services and new models of healthcare.

AHPA president Vittorio Cintio has commended the overall objective of the PCEHR legislation, which he said would give consumers more control over their health information and allow healthcare providers quicker and in some cases, shared access to patient records.

But he wants the government to provide support for allied health professionals to be able to participate in the eHealth system, just like it does for GPs.