Ananya Mandal, News-Medical
“Both the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA) and the Australian Privacy Foundation have criticised the private corporation established by the federal and state governments to roll out the federal government’s proposed electronic health records. They have told a Senate inquiry hearing in Canberra that personally-controlled e-health records should not go live on July 1 as planned.
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Charles Wright, eHealthCentral
“Today’s Sydney Morning Herald picks up on a study that showed electronic prescribing systems in two Australian teaching hospitals dramatically reduced medication errors.
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Amy Corderoy, smh.com.au
“Electronic prescribing systems could drastically cut previously intractable hospital medication errors, a study of two Sydney hospitals has found.
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Westbrook JI et al, PLoS Med, 9(1)
Background
Considerable investments are being made in commercial electronic prescribing systems (e-prescribing) in many countries. Few studies have measured or evaluated their effectiveness at reducing prescribing error rates, and interactions between system design and errors are not well understood, despite increasing concerns regarding new errors associated with system use. This study evaluated the effectiveness of two commercial e-prescribing systems in reducing prescribing error rates and their propensities for introducing new types of error.
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David More, Australian Health Information Technology
“I first have to point out that this short article is being written in late January and while, as we slipped off into the ‘silly season’ last year, we might have been forgiven for thinking the e-Health path for 2012 has been clearly marked, it seems, somehow that six short weeks have changed everything.
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Thomas Beale, Woland's Cat
“In his recent blog post, Eric Browne highlights what may be a problem in the design of the Australian PCEHR, due to the well-known CDA feature allowing dual forms of content – text and structured, supposedly equivalent – to be stored in the one document.
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Chloe Herrick, Computerworld
“The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has continued to lobby the government to change its $466.7 million e-health record system to an “opt-out” model, arguing that the current “opt-in” model will undermine the system’s health improvement objectives.
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Charles Wright, eHealthCentral
“Anyone with the slightest idea of large-scale software development would have been staggered by the surpassing silliness contained in yesterday’s piece in the Medical Observer, in which “ehealth consultant” David More trots out his analysis of the problem which has brought the desktop software side of the PCEHR project to a temporary halt.
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David More, Australian Health Information Technology
“So just where are the technical details of what is wrong, how long it has been present, what is needed to fix it, and so on.
This is a public organisation that is basically saying ‘up-yours’ to the Clinical Health IT Community and the public in general.
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Charles Wright, eHealthCentral
“It took a couple of days for The Australian and the usual suspects to catch up with the news of the problems with the specifications for the PCEHR which I reported on Sunday and again yesterday, which may explain the enthusiasm with which they have greeted confirmation of the story in a statement from NEHTA.
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Charles Wright, eHealthCentral
“The NEHTA lead sites involved in the roll-out of the PCEHR are in a state of bemused uncertainty, as they await details of the specification problems I wrote about yesterday. The mass media, medical and trade press, and for that matter the blogosphere and Twitterverse seem still to be unaware of the problem.
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Eleri Harris, ABC
“All around the country GPs are connecting with their local hospitals and beyond through a brand new an electronic health records system.
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Andrew Tillett, The West Australian
“A family group has attacked plans to allow children as young as 14 to stop their parents from accessing their personal electronic health records.
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Peter Jean, The Canberra Times
“Teenagers will be able to stop their parents accessing their personally controlled electronic health records which are due this year.
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Kate McDonald, Pulse+IT
“NSW Health has launched a new website allowing easy access to population health data for the state.
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Charles Wright, eHealthCentral
“After that less than stellar performance in the Sunday Age [below] Tim Barlass redeems himself with a fascinating piece about a trial in rural NSW in which elderly patients given a broadband “medibox” which monitored details of blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen and weight and logged them remotely to doctors, demonstrated a dramatic decrease in hospital admissions, and shorter stays.
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Chloe Herrick, Computerworld
“The National E-Health Transition Authority (NeHTA) will maintain its current design for personal e-health records despite acknowledging concerns that increased consumer control over health information could potentially result in poorer health outcomes for patients.
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Tim Barlass, Sydney Morning Herald
“Elderly patients given medical equipment to monitor their health on the internet go to hospital only half as often, a trial has found.
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Pulvirenti M et al, Health Expectations, 2011
Background
Patient or person centred care is widely accepted as the philosophy and practice that underpins quality care. An examination of the Australian National Chronic Disease Strategy and literature in the field highlights assumptions about the self-manager as patient and a focus on clinical settings.
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Michael Owen, The Australian
“While South Australia was busy rolling out its advanced e-health plan, other states were still planning their own different systems – raising doubts about a national strategy to ultimately link electronic records across all hospitals in every jurisdiction.
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