My spin detector spun into the red zone last week following an article posted on a well known commentary web site in the Australian e-health space. The article opened with:- “As the adoption of the personal e-health record (PCEHR) in Australia starts to snowball, we are likely to see fewer medication errors and improved diagnostic and […]

During the Health Informatics Conference in Brisbane in August 2011, the CEO of Australia’s National E-health Transition Authority, Peter Fleming, likened building the  national system of Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) to putting a man on the moon.Well let’s examine where we are at the end of 2011, with 6 months to go to […]

Well, it’s just a little over 14 months till the launch of Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR). And we have already seen two ‘waves’ of grant funded ‘implementations’ announced by Health Minister Nicola Roxon. The PCEHR draft ‘Concept of Operations‘ was released publicly on the 12th of April and  organisations and individuals have until […]

It is now almost 5 years since the Australian Government launched its 2006 e-Government Strategy, Responsive Government: A New Service Agenda, and over a year since the “Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0″ Report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce was handed down. It seems that many government departments and agencies involved in e-health have deliberately side-stepped […]

There is much frustration with the slow progress in e-health around the world over the past decade or more. That frustration leads to partisan views and divisiveness across and within organisations about how to improve the situation. Some argue that much more money should be spent. Others argue that the amount of money is not […]

Implementing a national Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system through grant funded proposals submitted by interested parties seems to me a strange way to implement national infrastructure of any kind. It might be a common mechanism for funding projects in the arts, and for scientific research, where we don’t know what we might end […]

The Australian Government has released its proposal for a “Competitive and Sustainable Banking System”, consisting of a number of parallel streams, the first of which includes:- “The Government will appoint former Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Bernie Fraser to conduct a comprehensive feasibility study to examine the technological options, the potential timeline and processes for […]

Well, two themes dominated the two day e-health summit in Melbourne this week:- Infectious enthusiasm vagueness of the PCEHR These two themes actually run hand in glove. Both the vagueness of the PCEHR model and the rampant optimism are in large part due to ignorance. There was an endless supply of fresh consumer, bureaucrat and […]

Amongst the frenetic activity arising from Health Minister Roxon’s promise to have a personally controlled health record (PCEHR) available to all Australians by July 2012, and her more recent announcement of a summit on the subject at the end of November, comes the spawning of a spate of related articles in the media. In particular, […]

I started out titling this post “the getting of wisdom”, but slowly came around to acknowledge that there has been some real wisdom generated in health informatics over the years – it just seems to mysteriously dissipate like dry ice on a sunny day, simply adding to the world’s increasing entropy. People ignore it. People […]