This appeared a few days ago.
Little interest in eHealth system
By CLARE COLLEY
Oct. 1, 2013, 4 a.m.
ONLY 1178 residents in Orange have signed up for the federal government’s eHealth record system giving them, their doctor, pharmacist and other healthcare providers online access to their health information, despite it being up and running for more than a year.
Since August 12, health department staff have signed up 1100 residents for the optional service at the Orange Medicare Office.
The eHealth record system was rolled out in July 2012 to allow any registered healthcare provider including general practitioners (GP), pharmacists, and allied health professionals to access a patient’s eHealth record.
As a privacy measure, it is up to the individual to choose who can access their information.
“You control what goes into it, and who is allowed to access it,” a health department spokesman said.
“Your eHealth record allows you and your doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers to view and share your health information to provide you with the best possible care.”
Although users of the eHealth system use the same myGov account login to access other federal government services such as Centrelink, Veterans Affairs and Child Support, the eHealth records are kept separate, according to the department spokesman.
In NSW, more than 1950 healthcare providers use the system and 270,000 residents are registered for an eHealth record.
Australia-wide 924,623 residents have signed up as of last Wednesday.
More here:
This amounts to 3.98% of the population of 23.238 million after 15 months of operation.
It is really going to have to start to move up more quickly to reach its targets and more importantly to actually be useful.
Of course - as usual - we don’t seem to have any data on the levels of regular use and the numbers of real clinical documents held in the system so far.
Time for a bit better disclosure I think.
David.
3 comments:
A dire collection of faults in Obamacare registration website at Drudge Report, as noted by InformaticsMD. Not a good look for HealthIT.
Also, noted elsewhere, US Health Spending Projected to Grow an Average of 5.8 Percent Annually Through 2022.
That's a 'healthy' growth industry, in anyone's language. The laws of economics are an iron-clad guarantee that, wherever & whatever the inefficiencies in the US healthcare system, those 'faults' are some of the drivers for growth. Backers of the status quo (including the beneficiaries at all levels) will gloat at the difficulties written into that Registration page. Same applies here. So, perhaps a different strategy is needed for progress in HealthIT in Oz. Smaller targets and provable gains, for one, as long as they are consistent with an achievable structure. Like, how NeHTA should have been tasked in the first place.
Welcome to Government programs, where they actually have to listen to people, not merely build it on their own rules and find out whether it works. Actually, it comes to the same thing: you find out whether it works. But governments have to consult, or they get voted out (that happens too). And consulting is damned expensive - and all the wrong people talk to you, and only a few of the right people. It's hard to tell them apart. While people talk about facebook etc, how many wanna-be's have fallen by the way-side? 10x as many?
Just don't rely on facts changing some people's opinions. It's called the backfire effect.
How facts backfire
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire?mode=PF
"Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
Post a Comment