From Medical Director to Microsoft – another Australian e-health delay drama

From today’s edition of 6 minutes:

“A pharmacy-driven electronic prescribing project announced with much fanfare earlier this year has hit a setback with one partner, prescribing software company Medical Director, going cold on the project.

“In March the Pharmacy Guild announced a ScriptX project to start in October which would allow GPs to create electronic prescriptions on a central encrypted hub that any participating pharmacy could access and dispense.

“But the project’s creators, pharmacy software company Fred Health, now says it is looking to work with new partners such as Microsoft to develop a similar system, known as eRx Script Exchange, to start next year.

A spokesman for the company, Mr Paul Naismith, told 6minutes that their original partners HCN, the vendors of Medical Director, had decided not to go ahead with the SciptX project as planned.”

Is this the precursor to Microsoft launching its HealthVault product in Australia? Meanwhile, no great surprises that HCN/Medical Director have backed out on the project; if a teacher was to give a report card on HCN, it would no doubt include the comment, “Does not play well with other children”…