AusHealthIT Turns One!

Well the blog is one year old on March 5, 2007. It now has one hundred and thirty eight entries and a regular readership that exceeds one hundred and fifty different individuals each time a new article is added.

The current top 10 most read articles are as follows:

1. Personal Health Information Privacy – The Elephant in the Room

2. Archetypically Stupid!

3. Electronic Prescribing – What is Needed to Move Forward?

4. NEHTA’s Annual Report – What We are Not Being Told.

5. Privacy Issues Related to the Proposed Access Card.

6. E-Mail Security and Clinical Practice.

7. E-Prescribing in Australia – Is there a New Plan?

8. How Did iSoft Get into So Much Trouble?

9. Clinical Research Information Now More Freely Available on the Internet.

10. AusHealthIT's First Guest Blogger Article.

Amazingly the different pages on the blog have now been viewed 13,333 times since I worked out how to set up a site counter in May, 2006.

The steady growth in feed subscribers has been encouraging and suggests that at least the blog is of interest and slightly controversial rather than being a total bore!

Feed Subscribers


What is there to learn from all this regarding the current state of and planned directions for E-Health in Australia? I take the following from the level of interest and the comments posted.

1. The topic of Health IT (e-health) is of interest to many more people than would initially be thought.

2. The topics of interest are – with a few exceptions – centred around the need for better policy in the area.

3. The themes of the blog in suggesting the need for a substantive National E-Health Strategy, Business Case and Implementation Plan and clarity around the importance of Health IT in the areas of patient safety and quality of care are supported.

4. The need to have sorted out a plan and then to ‘get on with it’ using proven and known technologies is totally un-controversial. There is widespread amazement in the E-Health community that the opportunity cost of doing nothing in the e-Health space is unrecognised. It is costing the community dearly in both lives and dollars.

5. Frustration with the lack of strategic clarity in the e-Health space is forcing development and implementation activity which is to be welcomed but which could be so much more effective and valuable if undertaken in a supportive, rational and co-ordinated framework.

6. There is widespread disappointment and frustration that NEHTA has focussed too much on the “E” and not enough on the “Health” leaving its efforts being seen as largely irrelevant to the Health Sector in general and increasingly the E-Health Community in particular. It is very important for NEHTA to be successful for E-Health in Australia to prosper and right now it does not seem to be heading in the right direction or listening to the E-Health Community very effectively.

I sense change is coming in this election year and also that Year 2 will be a very interesting one!

I would love comments on the above.

David.