Bill Ferris, chairman of the fund's advisory board, has backed the creation of electronic health records as "essential" to improving Australia's health system. "If we fund everything else and not this, it might result in lots of shiny engines and carriages rattling along different gauge health system tracks across the nation."
The shift away from paper-based records was one of the "obvious capital funding demands" that could be made of the fund, Mr Ferris noted. However, he made clear he was expressing his personal views and not those of the board or government. His first public statements on possible funding priorities come after Kevin Rudd's hand-picked health adviser last month threw its substantial weight behind a $1.1bn to $1.8bn plan to create an electronic health record for every Australian by 2012.
Progress towards digitising medical records, assigning them unique identifiers and giving patients control of the information has been slow, despite near unanimity about e-health's value in improving communication between health workers and reducing life-threatening mistakes.
Electronic prescribing and internet consultations are also no closer to reality, despite past Council of Australian Governments spending of $318 million on e-health projects.
The Prime Minister has given himself six months to respond to National Health and Hospital Reform Commission recommendations on e-health and other reforms. Mr Rudd has already warned that his cash-strapped government will not be able to finance all of the commission's proposals and will look for fresh savings to offset new spending.
But one of the government's few sources of available and unallocated money is the Health and Hospitals Fund, set up with an initial $5bn from the 2008-09 budget and plans for a matching top-up in the 2009-10 budget.
The 2009-10 budget abandoned the planned $5bn top-up and instead committed $3.2bn from the fund to 57 health infrastructure projects, from upgrades to state-run hospitals to the building of cancer centres and research facilities. The advisory board had the powerful role of gatekeeper on the final list of successful projects, culling 56 of the 125 original proposals for their failure to meet the fund's evaluation criteria.
The government is legally unable to spend fund money on projects the board does not recommend.
The commission has estimated the total capital investment required to redesign the health system at between $4.3bn and $7.3bn over a five-year period.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Siobhain Ryan
Quelle/Source: The Australian, 07.08.2009
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