Indigenous health sees $4.3 million IT boost
Indigenous health in Queensland, the Northern Territory, Victoria and South Australia will receive $4.3 million to upgrade IT services.
The Minister for Indigenous Health Minister, Warren Snowdon today announced plans which will see the money distributed across four Aboriginal health organisations to assist over 50 health services in the four states.
The Nganampa Health Council in South Australia will receive almost $2 million for IT systems maintenance and a web-based reporting trial. The Aboriginal Medical Services Association (AMSANT) will see just over $1.5 million for the development of a shared IT arrangement with other Aboriginal medical services and to evaluate the viability of an e-health system in the Northern Territory.
"This will now allow AMSANT to undertake a significant expansion in assisting its member health services in accessing patient data remotely through better connectivity; enhance health reporting and analysis through grass roots data collection," Snowdon said."For example, a clinician will be able to visit a patient out bush and access patient data from a central data base, and update the patient's personal chronic disease management plan."
The Queensland Aboriginal Islander Health Council has been allocated just over $700,000 to pilot a shared health record initiative with GPs and the Mildura Aboriginal Corporation in Victoria will be given 65,000 to consolidate its patient information management systems and purchase a server to network across the organisations different sites.
"This funding support will help bring these Aboriginal health bodies to the forefront of the IT health field. In particular it will enhance their data collection processes further and this will, in turn, improve their capacity to measure whether these services are closing the gap in health outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians," Snowdon said.
The funding comes after the Rudd Government allocated $466.7 million to develop a national e-health system in this year's Federal Budget.
Front page image credit: MedicalTwitter Consult image by 24oranges.nl, CC BY-SA 2.0