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. […]

An online browser of the healthcare terminology managed by NEHTA and proposed for future use in clinical information systems, clinical registries and research has been developed by Andrew Patterson and is available at: Federation Health . It currently includes browsing and searching of SNOMED CT-AU and the Australian Medicines Terminology. My understanding is that this is […]

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 […]

I’ve just had a consultation for blocked ears, with a GP at a busy Adelaide clinic. People have told me I don’t listen, but this was definitely a hearing problem. GP took a swab, cleaned me out, gave me a computer-printed prescription for drops and antibiotics, handed me a tiny hand-scrawled chit and sent me on my […]

Healthbase Australia has updated the online Australian Medicines Terminology browser to the 2.15 version released by NEHTA today. AMT Browser (Healthbase Australia).  All deprecated versions are still available for browsing/searching. Pity the download process cannot be automated. Perhaps if this were the 1980s NEHTA could publish the updates (with sensible filenames!) via an FTP service. […]

In my previous posting on this blog, I cited hospital discharge summaries as a potential barometer of broader e-health capability. I’m sure there are significant organisational and “change management” factors that have impeded the deployment  of information sharing typified by electronic discharge summaries. Many commentators dismiss technological obstacles as a minor distraction in some vast […]

The inertia embodied in the Australian health system is immense. Attempts to change it have mainly foundered over the years. Portents of failure are writ large, almost everywhere one turns. In this context, let’s look at a favourite topic of mine, the electronic discharge summary. I view electronic discharge summaries as a barometer of e-health […]

Sorry to harp on about this, but I do believe this is an extremely serious issue. The US Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HiMMS) recently put out a call with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) for an Interoperability Showcase as part of their annual conference. Included in the notice is the following [my emphasis]. […]

There has been a long held view, even mantra, amongst health informaticians that data should be “structured” and  “coded” if it is to be harnessed for clinical decision support, adverse event prevention, and for research purposes. One trouble is, the concept of “coded” data means different things to different people. Australia was at the international […]

A few days ago I singled out Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), perhaps unfairly, in a posting about what seems to me to be widespread ignorance of  a profound issue in e-health – that of information usefulness ( or the lack thereof ). That might be hard to believe, given that the USA government has […]