Last year in Australia there was an agreement amongst a number of parties, led by the Australian Department of Health, for the results of diagnostic tests to be sent to the national electronic health record system for accessing by both care providers and the individuals for whom the tests were performed. The current proposal to […]

On its  shiny new website  under About NEHTA , NEHTA now starts its strategy statement with: “With the foundations built, the infrastructure in place…“. Nothing can be further from the truth. No amount of shouting from the rooftops, even by NEHTA’s Chairman, can change the facts. Most of us involved at the coalface of e-health know only too well […]

It is now over eighteen months since I publicly aired my grave concerns regarding a  critical safety issue for Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) system, which centred around the lack of scrutiny of the quality of data in CDA documents to be contributed to people’s records. I have no idea if anyone other […]

Fortunately, I’m now almost old enough to have forgotten the christmas pudding ritual – helping my father cut up the suet, spread out on sheets  of newspaper on the dining room table. In those days, I was then already tall enough to also be able to peer down into the saucepan my mother used to […]

Background With the burgeoning prevalence of diabetes mellitus in Australia and many other countries, there has been an accompanying increase in blood tests for its diagnosis and treatment. One of the commonest tests used is for determining the average amount of sugar in a person’s blood over the past several months, by measuring the ratio […]

I think it is important to lay out some principles for the capture, storage, display and communication of information derived from diagnostic tests – commonly labelled in Australia as pathology and radiology. In particular, I’m concerned about maximising the reuse of information, both for direct patient care, as well as for research. In order to […]

A common theme in e-health, particularly in Australia, is the often conflicting perspective of different participants in the healthcare landscape. I’d like to highlight a couple of these in the diagnostic testing arena. The first is a ‘business‘ issue – one of cost/benefit discrepancies; the second is a ‘technical‘ issue – conflicting perspectives on terminologies. […]

Why so complex? This is the first of several blogs on the subject of pathology data. Others will cover principles and pragmatic tradeoffs. There are many independent factors associated with diagnostic tests, that when combined, produce an unparalleled level of complexity in data capture, representation and exchange,  when compared with most other subdomains of health. […]