Industry welcomes e-health funding, wants detail

James Riley
Wednesday, 12 May 2010 14:21

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

Industry has broadly welcomed Federal plans to spend $466.7 million building a national electronic records management infrastructure in the health sector, but say too few details have been released to fully understand what the system might achieve.

The investment over two years in the national e-health records system is the big-ticket project in Treasurer Wayne Swan's third budget and aims to improve patient safety through better management of prescriptions, and to cut waste and duplication.

But industry analysts say IT infrastructure across the various jurisdictions of the health sector has been such a hairball for so long that implementation will be a significant challenge, and not enough was known about the targeted roll-out areas to gauge its potential for success.

And the Rudd Government's e-health plans still have to content with an expected campaign from privacy advocates who worry that the Individual Healthcare Identifiers - an ID number - on which the records management system will operate are not secure enough.

Further, there is no guarantee that the legislation required to implement the scheme - most notably the introduction of the IHI number - will get through the Parliament any time soon. Government had hoped to have the legislation in place by the middle of the year, but with a hostile Senate and growing obstructionism from the Opposition, this is no certainty.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon says e-health system will revolutionise the delivery of health services in Australia and was a key building block for the Government's health reform agenda.

Through the system, patients will for the first time have online access to information about their medical history - including medications, test results and allergies and medical history. It also lets the patient control which doctors and other healthcare providers access that information.

But while Ms Roxon has promised rigorous governance and oversight procedures to maintain privacy, the lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia remains unconvinced and is mounting a campaign against the IHI - which it says it similar to the Howard Government Access Card proposal and Bob Hawke's Australia Card.

About 2-3 per cent of hospital admissions in Australia are linked medication errors, the Government says, which equates to 190,000 admissions each year and costs the health system $660 million. About 8 per cent of those medical errors are because of inadequate patient information.