IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Health professionals will no longer have to transport boxes of patient notes over long distances and doctors will be able to support clinics after hours.

Medical Message Exchange (MMEx) was developed as an e-health platform at UWA's Centre for Software Practice. Used by more than 7,000 health professionals in Australia for secure information sharing and clinical patient management, it is a web-based clinical system. It incorporates the latest technical standards from the National e-Health Transition Authority, evidence-based clinical protocols for chronic disease, and specific modules for management of cancer and wounds.

The Minister for Rural Development, Phillip Costa, says more than $11 million will be provided over the next five years to service communities not covered by the national broadband network.

Every year millions of medication errors arise out of misreading prescriptions, wrong doses, wrong dose regimen, overlooked drug interactions etc. This report was prepared by the management consultants Booz and Company. The report also says that installation of this computerized system will cost between $4bn and $8.5bn. The rollout would give governments a 68 per cent ($5.2bn) share of the estimated savings.

The GPs mentioned that since August 2009, they were using the system through an e-health Practice Incentive Program (PIP). The system was managed by Medicare on behalf of the federal Health Department.

Medical staff in the Greater Southern Region will soon be able to take advantage of a remote diagnosis system after receiving a funding boost of more than AU$2 million from each of the federal and New South Wales administrations.

Dubbed 'ServiceFirst', the agency's web site states it has about 540 staff providing services to about 80 agencies with approximately 8,800 staff. It was created over the past few months from the previous CCSU, CSS and Department of Commerce Shared Services branches.

Walk into any hospital, Emergency Department or outpatient clinic in South-Eastern Sydney & Illawarra, New South Wales, and the clinician will bring up your full medical history on a computer before you sit down.

It’s what more than a million residents can expect through what is likely the biggest implementation of an electronic medical records (eMR) system in the Southern Hemisphere. The massive ground-up IT system has tentacles in almost every facet of healthcare: From surgery and emergency, to pathology and nutrition, to bedside care and discharge.

Plans for the centre were discussed on Friday during a visit to the Coffs Harbour campus by Senator Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, and the Labor candidate for Cowper, Paul Sekfy.

Senator Conroy and Mr Sekfy met with SCU's Professor of Information Technology and Information Systems Professor Peter Croll, who led the submission for the early rollout of the National Broadband Network for the Australian eastern regional corridor.

Macquarie University Hospital, located on the Macquarie University campus, is designed to be a "digital hospital", according to chief information officer, Geoff Harders. Existing paper records will be migrated into a digital format for use on workstations, and patient care is tracked by Siemens "cockpit" systems, eliminating clipboard charts in a patient's room.

"There's a lot of things being done that haven't been done in the past... we're about trying to become an exemplar," Harders said. The paperless system sees patient records, tests, dietary requirements and other relevant information entered into the hospital's system and added to the patient's digital record.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced yesterday Coffs Harbour has been selected for the next roll-out of the National Broadband Network.

This stunning coup will transform the region’s economic future if we capitalise on the early-adopter window of opportunity.

The Northern Territory government has launched a new electronic prescription service that aims to reduce discrepancies caused by doctor's handwriting and improve patient care.

The million-dollar Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions (ETP) project is a product of two year's development and will provide health care agencies, including hospitals, general practitioners and aged care facilities with faster and less error prone pharmaceutical service.

The implementation of national e-health standards has taken another step forward with Northern Territory health agencies launching a secure messaging delivery system to share information between different clinical software systems.

Known as the Web Services Messaging Application (WSMA), the web service sends health information between different software using a first generation messaging specification, drafted by the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA).

When will some really good health news get some coverage? While the media has recently been fixated by the world financial crisis, political backstabbing, or the misdeeds of the latest rogue doctor, real progress has occurred in NSW e-health that will bring far-reaching benefits to everyone in the state.

The NSW government has announced a reshuffle in the Department of Health, with a “realignment of functions” resulting in a new advertisement for the role of director of e-health and ICT strategy.

The realignment follows the implementation of the recently announced NSW Health ICT strategy, with the advertisement stating that it is an attempt to “position NSW Health at the forefront of the national e-health agenda”.

As reported by Computerworld, NSW Health has been developing an online medical records system called Healthelink for the past four years.

National E-Health Transition Authority chief executive Peter Fleming told a Senate inquiry into the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Bill that - once the legislation and as yet undisclosed regulatory controls are passed by Parliament - up to 6 million Australians could have Medicare-assigned unique patient numbers, intended to support clinician access to personal health information, within that timeframe.

The NSW Government will contribute $7.5 million to establish the centre and support it to 2013. Matching in-kind support will be provided the CSIRO and NICTA.

At start up in 2011 the centre will employ about 20 people in the CSIRO's ICT Centre in Marsfield but from the outset will operate over multiple sites. The Marsfield site will be connected by broadband to NICTA at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern, Sydney and to the NSW Government's NBN testbed at Parkbridge Estate, south west of Sydney. In 2011 the network will extend to Armidale, an NBN first release site.