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 […]

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 […]

Australia is poised to produce a system of Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHRs) from July 2012, some 6 months from now. According to the recently published Concept of Operations, each person’s PCEHR will comprise a set of electronic documents, the majority of which are to be based on HL7’s Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), in […]

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 […]

I have, on a number of occasions over the past decade,  tried to explain the importance of building software, systems, national infrastructure, etc. on the right foundations. Other people who do this in the e-health arena often talk purely about the importance of standards and the analogy with the ‘rail gauge problem’ experienced in Australia […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]