Excerpted from Australian Doctor, 20 March 2009:

With so much reform in the offing, does the Rudd Government have the political will to finally make e-health a reality? Ray Welling investigates.

Ordinary Australians can use their bank cards all over the world or seamlessly connect their laptop to a wireless net work from Broome to Berlin, yet their critical health data can’t be shared with their local hospital or even the pharma cist down the road.

This is despite extensive international and Australian research pointing to significant savings in lives as well as public health expense when health IT innovation is applied.

This year researchers in Texas reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine that increasing the automation of hospital notes and records led to a substantial decline in mor tality rates for all conditions studied. An author of the study said that by computeris ing health records, more than 100,000 lives a year could be saved in the US alone.

Closer to home, a 2002 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare study found that up to 18% of medical errors — many of them fatal — were due to inadequate availability of patient information.

According to the study, these adverse events account for as much as 3% of the gov ernment’s total cost of care — $3 billion a year in avoidable cost.

A business case for a national electronic health record program was published last year by the National E- Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), which suggested a net benefit to the Australian economy of between $7.5 billion and $8.7 billion over the first 10 years.

Australia is not the only late adopter of e-health. In the US, just 1.7% of hospitals sur veyed in 2008 had fully imple mented a comprehensive patient e-health records system across all units of their hospi tals and only 7.9% had imple mented a basic system.

However, the US is much closer to fully sharing health data. Electronic health initia tives were specifically men tioned in former US President Mr George W Bush’s last four State of the Union addresses, and USPresident Mr Barack Obama announced shortly before his inauguration that he was dedicated to making 100% of personal health records available electroni cally within five years. He backed that up by allocating $US20 billion in his initial economic stimulus bill to the task. Electronic health records were specifically mentioned in his maiden speech to the US Congress in February.

SO what’s happening in Australia? It’s not that we’ve been ignoring e- health. It is estimated that more than $5 billion has been spent by state and territory governments, GP divisions, and others on e-health devel opment activities in the past 10 years.

Those initiatives include a program by General Practice Network NT to have the entire NT population regis tered for shared electronic health records by 2010, bed side electronic records and clinical decision support tools being trialled in SA hospitals, a $250 million Enterprise Information Repository in Queensland, and a hospital- based electronic health record system deployed in the South Eastern Sydney and Illawarra Area Health Service in NSW, which is soon to be rolled out across the state.

But for e-health to make a real difference, national co- ordination is needed. On a national level, NEHTA was set up with Commonwealth funding in 2005 to develop core technical foundations for e-health in Australia, such as clinical terminologies, infor mation messaging standards and designing unique con sumer and care provider iden tifiers.

Other than this, however, none of the local or state groups developing e-health systems are talking to each other or working to create sys tems that can be integrated across borders. Some can’t even be integrated across hos pitals or surgeries in the same state. It’s a situation that brings to mind the 19th cen tury, when each colony built its railway systems using incompatible rail gauges.

Read the full story here (password required – let me know if you’d like a full copy).