Presenting at the Health Informatics Conference (HIC) 2005 in Melbourne this week, Mary Blackwood, who heads the Tasmanian rollout of the nationwide HealthConnect EHR initiative, said fewer than 2000 people had registered for the smartcard-enabled Medicare cards that are being trialled in that state as an accompaniment to the broader HealthConnect project.
Full implementation of HealthConnect, which is designed to provide a standard format for patient health records so that healthcare providers can seamlessly share information, will commence in Tasmania in November in the north-western region around Launceston, Blackwood said.
"It's about sending standardised electronic messages between hospitals and GPs," she explained. "This may not seem very ambitious, but people who know hospital systems know that it is actually a relatively substantial project. Down the track, it's going to enable automatic admission and discharge notifications, and electronic discharge summaries".
Implementation of EHR is an extremely complex undertaking, since electronic healthcare records must be able to be passed between general practitioners, pathology laboratories, consultants, hospital emergency staff, nurses, aged care providers and the myriad other elements of Australia's healthcare system. Each element of the healthcare treatment chain has typically run its own systems, making data exchange virtually impossible and leading to data problems and duplication of effort that has frustrated attempts to rein in the cost of healthcare.
Updates from Blackwood's peers in the Northern Territory (where 3500 largely rural residents have signed up for a HealthConnect implementation that went live on July 1) and South Australia (where the statewide Careconnect.sa system, Australia's largest EHR implementation, processes 80,000 transactions per day and has 4500 active users across all eight Adelaide hospitals) confirm that previously theoretical efforts to implement meaningful EHR systems are finally bearing fruit.
Whether that fruit is sweet enough to satisfy Abbott, however, remains to be seen. In late June, Abbott raised eyebrows after telling a Canberra breakfast meeting that he was "sick of trials and studies and working groups" and expected an EHR delivering tangible results within a year. That makes the current HealthConnect projects, which are progressing from trials to full implementations in several states, particularly timely.
While discussions about the desirability and technical obstacles impeding EHR takeup have dominated previous events, the mood at this year's conference was far more optimistic. Positive results from early trials -- and a demonstration of HealthConnect by DSTC, the government body that has taken the lead on developing HealthConnect's complex underlying infrastructure -- gave the feeling that the industry is finally gaining the traction that has eluded it.
Abbott's criticism will no doubt create significant interest as he closes the conference with an address this afternoon. But the 12-month deadline was already looming large over the conference yesterday, as more than 400 delegates and dozens of healthcare information systems providers descended on the event.
Belying previous arguments that an EHR must be rolled out nationwide at all levels to be of any use, the general sentiment of most conference speakers was that any EHR is better than no EHR at all. With Abbott's deadline lighting a fire under the e-health community, those attendees now have the next year's work cut out for them.
