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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Well it is now several months since I established the Global HL7 Challenge and the deadline for the first part of the challenge has just passed with no respondents. I can only put this down to a global lack of capability to implement HL7 CDA based solutions beyond the simple HTML style of document rendering. […]

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 […]

On December the 8th, 2010 the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) published an extraordinary “Report to the President realizing the full potential of health information technology to improve healthcare for Americans: the path forward“. This report is extraordinary for a number of reasons. Firstly,  PCAST is not comprised of government […]

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 […]

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]. […]