During a visit to western Sydney this week, federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon visited a GP clinic that will be one of many in the area to lead the rollout of e-health records, including those of infants.
The project means the Blue Book -- a personal health record for infants, which NSW Health has been distributing to parents since 1988 -- will be available electronically and able to be viewed by parents, their GPs and other eligible health workers including those at nearby hospitals.
This project is specific to western Sydney, one of 12 "lead implementation sites" where specific aspects of electronic health records will be piloted before the system goes nationwide in July next year.
But other states have their own versions of the Blue Book, so parents across the country are likely to get similar benefits before then if they choose to sign up.
Kean-Seng Lim, a GP at the Mount Druitt Medical Centre in western Sydney -- one of the doctors nationwide who have agreed to pilot various e-health projects ahead of next year's full rollout -- says the impact of electronic records will be huge, extending far beyond infants.
While the Blue Book is part of the change, all patients including adults in western Sydney will be able to register, allowing a more complete and accurate recall of relevant information, not just in the GP surgery but elsewhere.
Illustrating the benefits of electronic health records, Lim says he saw a patient this week who had visited a cardiologist the previous week and was restarted on a medication, despite the fact the same specialist had stopped it a year ago because of side effects.
"That was not apparent to the cardiologist as he did not have access to the information, because cardiologists are not using a computerised information system," says Lim, who spotted the error and stopped the drug.
"With an e-health system, that's something that could potentially have been picked up and saved the patient an extra visit."
Roxon describes the project as an e-health revolution and says the 12 pilots were designed to "test out [the proposals] and find any problems".
"The lessons learned from this will be applied elsewhere. It's testing software, system capacity, interoperability between adopters, and between the adopters and hospitals, and potentially home users," Roxon says.
"The idea is to find any bugs, so you can then deploy nationally."
However, Lim says matters such as exactly what information will be available on the new system remain in negotiation, and the long-promised Concept of Operations document laying out how it will all work is still not available. It is now expected next week.
At this stage, e-records will probably include relevant clinical events, conditions such as allergies, medications and relevant past history.
But Lim adds: "I really do put this down as one of those things that will go down in medical history as a great thing; if it's done well".
One expert who's not convinced everything is going well is health IT consultant and blogger David More, a former intensive care specialist and hospital administrator.
He warns the work of ironing out the differences between clinicians, consumers, the IT industry and government is "not anywhere near done" and the process is being compromised by the pressure to adhere to a politically determined deadline of July 1, 2012.
"This is all completely experimental. They're trying to work out what they know and what they don't know, and how to do what they want to do," More says.
"The chance of them doing this in 15 months are two -- Buckley's and none."
According to More, the delayed Concept of Operations document outlines some 40 knotty issues of privacy and other points the parties have yet to agree how to resolve. He likens the project to a runaway train.
More adds: "People are pushing too hard, it's getting to be a mess, and there's money being wasted all over the place."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Adam Cresswell
Quelle/Source: The Australian, 09.04.2011
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