IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

A new system that could stop the accidental doubling up of medications will be introduced in the ACT.

Paper prescriptions and medication records will be phased out as ACT Health rolls out a new electronic medication management system over the next two years.

The MedChart system will replace the existing paper-based medication processes across Canberra Hospital and Health Services inpatient, outpatient and community, and inpatient areas at Calvary Health Care, in Bruce.

The federal government will begin rolling out an e-health system across the country in July, but it has been plagued by criticisms it would not reduce risks for patients and could be dangerous.

Until now, there was little evidence electronic prescribing, where doctors enter prescriptions into computer programs that often include information on patients and the other drugs they are on, would cut medication errors, the study leader, Johanna Westbrook, said.

Increased education about the benefits of digital health records will drive their adoption in Australia, according to healthcare software developer iCare. The e-health company this week opened a new office in East Melbourne, which Victorian technology minister Gordon Rich-Phillips said would create 35 ICT jobs over the next three years.

Personally controlled electronic health records (PCEHR) are “absolutely valuable” for “the very young, the chronically ill and the aged,” said iCare managing director, Chris Gray. While there have been political attacks and reports of slow adoption of Australia's PCEHR, Gray voiced optimism due to digital records’ high value to patient care. He said education will be critical to driving uptake.

The Victorian Government's emergency services, health and transport departments have received the lion's share of an estimated $258 million in new IT investment outlined in the state's 2012-2013 budget.

In what Ovum research director Steve Hodgkinson labelled "slim pickings for the IT industry" in regard to substantial new projects, the state budget nonetheless targeted several portfolios to receive new investment over the next four years.

In his report Management of ePassports, Auditor-General Ian McPhee said his audit assessed the effectiveness of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s (DFAT) implementation of biometric technology to meet international requirements for enhanced passport security.

Capgemini Australia public sector head Shelley Oldham says Australia could benefit from applying a "service cluster lens" to its analysis of e-government services.

The EC uses a ranking system to identify which member countries have implemented the most mature e-government services for citizens and business.

Warren Lemmens, the CTO of Nokia Oceania, discusses Australia's emerging smart city landscape — and what the U.S. can learn from it.

Word from down under: Cities need to get smarter about data, younger people need to lead the charge, and the U.S. is not exactly out front on this stuff.

When Nokia released a detailed analysis on civic tech in the southern hemisphere, titled A new world of cities and the future of Australia — which gives a thorough accounting of the emerging smart city landscape there — we talked to Warren Lemmens, Nokia’s CTO Oceania, about the report's findings and its implications for U.S. cities struggling to get a handle on the smart city landscape.

Expectations for usage of 'one-stop-shop' portals have not been met, says Glenn Archer Government portals have been used for decades to provide information to citizens, as well as simplify and consolidate online services, but there’s no denying that there has been mixed success over the years.

Good portals, however, drive service improvement and value, and represent an ideal transition platform to digital government. We have seen an obvious change in the application of portals in recent years.

Often viewed as a pipedream, eHealth is finally making its way out of the realm of imagination and into reality. But is the hype surrounding eHealth justified?

As advancements continue to be made with computer technology, and the Internet becomes more commonplace in our daily work and private lives, transformation is expected to occur in many traditional work sectors.

E-Health consultant and medico Dr David More accessed the audit trail on his own e-health record this week and revealed the "gobbledegook" result on his Health Information Technology blogsite.

While e-health systems can foster safer care, an editorial published in today's Medical Journal of Australia warns that problems in design or operation can also lead to patient harm or death.

"The handful of local studies on e-health safety all point to clear evidence of past harms and future risks," says Enrico Coiera, director of the University of NSW's Centre for Health Informatics, along with co-authors executive dean of Flinders University's Faculty of Health Sciences Michael Kidd and National E-Health Transition Authority clinical lead Mukesh Haikerwal.

The electronic health record scheme, due to start on July 1, is yet to provide safeguards to prevent mistakes with doctors software.

Three experts including Chief clinical adviser to the e-health transition agency Mukesh Haikerwal warn the lack of a national clinical safety system to deal with computer glitches, and electronic devices means that 'it is not yet possible to make any definitive statement about whether the personally controlled electronic health record is safe or not.'

"Listening to the debate in parliament last week, I noticed that many of them don't understand the PCEHR," Dr Hambleton said.

"What they were talking about is a shared health record. This is not a shared health record, it's a personally controlled e-health record that contains a point-in-time health summary which is curated by a nominated health provider.

Health Minister Peter Dutton yesterday said just a few hundred doctors were using the system with just 5000 patients using the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records program which has previously been described as "shambolic".

The Opposition stated that this was money which would need to be allocated to Queensland Health on top of an existing $307 million already budgeted for the state’s e-health strategy, and $220 million which has been allocated to fix Queensland Health’s already disastrous payroll systems overhaul.

Most of the sites are using "a National E-Health Transition Authority-sponsored initiative to inject Individual Healthcare Identifiers (IHIs) into GP desktop software", the Medical Software Industry Association says.

New South Wales Health Minister Jillian Skinner has criticised the Federal Government for setting expectations too high on its 1 July e-health record launch.

Since Sunday, Australians have been able to register for a personally controlled e-health record (PCEHR), either via phone, in a Medicare office or by mailing in a form to Medicare. Much of the functionality for the system, including letting doctors put information in the records and connect their own systems to the PCEHR system, has yet to be implemented.

The Federal Government’s lead ICT procurement and coordination agency has prioritised delivery of better services, open engagement and the improvement of government operations as a means to improving use of ICT in Canberra.

In its five-year draft strategic vision released this week, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) outlined the government’s future use of ICT, building on its ICT Reform Program and shifting the focus to productivity.

The Federal Government is studying a whole-of-government big data strategy among several other initiatives as part of its three-year ICT strategy released last year, according to an update today.

Announced last October, the 40-page ICT strategy document aimed to improve operational efficiency, services and stakeholder engagement until 2015.

The Federal Government has revealed plans to allow larger departments to become cloud providers in their own right, with smaller agencies shifting between government-run resource pools with "minimum difficulty".

Guidelines [pdf] issued this week by the Government's central procurement office AGIMO sought to standardise approaches between agencies toward resource pooling under 'community' or 'government clouds'.