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The Rudd Government should bypass the National E-Health Transition Authority and fund a key health stakeholder group to develop an "agreed vision and plan for e-health", the Health Informatics Society of Australia says.

"Despite recognition in most other advanced countries of the need for investment in and the use of IT in the health sector, Australia sits without a plan for how it will deliver its e-health future," HISA said in a pre-Budget submission prepared for the federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan.

The Federal Government says a new national healthcare identifier service is one step closer, after a contract was signed to develop and test the scheme.

The service is designed to improve the transfer of patient information between health providers.

It will identify a person's name, date of birth, address and the names of their practitioners, and is the first step towards establishing a shared electronic health records system.

Despite having created one of the world’s best IT-enabled primary care systems, New Zealand’s innovation has stalled

New Zealand’s health IT strategies and policies are seemingly confused and ineffective, says HealthLink chief executive Tom Bowden.

In a wide-ranging document addressed to “health IT opinion leaders”, he is severely critical of government, though he doesn’t single out any one government agency for criticism.

Online medical records allowing access to personal files will revolutionise the health system, the Government says.

An electronic system accessible via a website is expected to be in place by early 2009.

Under the new "e-health" system, patients will be given a unique number to allow them, their doctor and other health specialists to access their medical history.

While governments around the world are still debating feasible (ie. cost-effective) ways of delivering 'standard' broadband access to all, there is already a push from some stakeholders for national governments to fund high-speed access to all homes and business premises.

The belief is that such investment will lead to greater economic wealth and social fulfilment for that particular country – and if not acted upon soon, some of the opportunities, especially around industry competitiveness, will be lost as other countries will have already seized the advantage. However, high-speed broadband investment (deploying fibre in the access network) can run into billions of dollars and the real benefits are hard to quantify and prove.