AusHealthIT Blog – Where to From Here?

The blog has now been on-line for a little over eight months and it seems like a good time to take stock of where it has come to and where it should now go.

What I know is that for a topic as absurdly arcane and Health Information Technology in Australia there is more than a little interest. The blog has two counters of activity. One counts the page views and visitor numbers on the main site. The other counts the number of reads and visits generated by e-mail alerts and RSS feeds.

To my amazement – since setting up the feed - there have been 6,413 views of the 62 different items published. This excludes all the direct view from the actual blog site – which is also seeing about 100 page reads per day on average.

In summary it looks like each article is now being read by at least 100 different people with the more “interesting” articles being read over 200 times.

Interestingly the origin of readers is international with a very strong Australian bias. (Australia 70%, US 11%, UK 9% Ireland 2% Rest 8% (India, Macedonia etc!)

On the basis of the feed activity the following ten articles (in order, so far) have been the most popular.

• E-Mail Security and Clinical Practice

• E-Prescribing in Australia – Is there a New Plan

• Oh HealthConnect! – You Have Done it Again

• How to Really Fail at Health IT Strategy

• What is Happening in Electronic Decision Support?

• Just Who Do They Think They are Fooling?

• Electronic Prescribing – What is Needed?

• Clinical Decision Support - A Major Contribution

• An Australian e-Health Strategy - The Outline

• NEHTA's Approach to Privacy V 1.0

This leads me to believe the readers of the blog are most interested in the strategies to be adopted in developing and implementing e-Health and in reviewing possible solutions and approaches. It is also clear many of the readers are interested in what is going on under the NEHTA and HealthConnect banners as well as the progress with the Access Card.

What is now needed are two things.

1. Suggestions as to what other topics should be addressed in the future.

2. Information and feedback on what is going either well or badly in the E-Health space in the “wide brown land”. In this context I am particularly interested in success stories that can be cited or emerging problems that could maybe be rectified.

I already am getting e-mail from places as diverse and Hong Kong and Canberra and the more I receive the better I can tailor the blog to meet people’s interests and needs.

Contact me with tips, news, comments etc (anonymously is fine via a fake Hotmail or Yahoo account if needed) at davidgm – at – optusnet.com.au. (substitute the “– at –“ with “@”). No information on correspondents will be made public without explicit permission!

David.