Opinions
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Thu 26th April 2012 by
By Julianne Bryce.I’m a registered nurse and one of 330,000 nurses and midwives in Australia. We make up more than 50 per cent of the health workforce which also makes us a really big player in e-health. E-health is important, and it’s something nurses and midwives are keen to get involved in. The further rural and remote you go the last woman standing will be a nurse, a midwife, or an Aboriginal health worker. We’re going to be important in the roll out of the PCEHR. What motivates nurses and midwives is person-centred care. We’re...
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Wed 18th April 2012 by
By Professor Martin Culwick
In general, anaesthetists are early adopters of technology and we work under a considerable time pressure. This is partly because in hospitals, patients are admitted on the same day of surgery and we have between five and fifteen minutes to assess them.
How we assess them can be the difference between life and death.
Obviously that assessment depends on the information, so the quality of the information is a very important safety factor. This is why we are very interested in the PCEHR.
At the Health e-Nation...
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Wed 11th April 2012 by
Late last year the National Health Call Centre Network commissioned an external market research company to survey over 5,000 Australians to understand where they were going for health information.
The results show that Australians, like many other nationalities around the globe are increasingly going online to find answers, information and support to enable them to care for themselves and there loved ones. The full report has not yet been released by the NHCCN, however I was granted permission to use extracts of the data to create an info-...
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Mon 7th November 2011 by
by Rachel de Sain We are all well aware of the challenges facing us and many other countries with both an ageing adult population and reduction in the numbers of people able and willing to care for them. The upshot? We need to be smarter in how we deliver care for our growing older population. This means we need to look at how we can utilise new technologies to improve the way we care for this growing older population, and improve the lot of those who care for them. We also need to maximise and support our existing workforce and...
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Wed 19th October 2011 by
The current challenge in healthcare is not federal versus state, or private versus public, but systemic versus fragmented. Our healthcare sector is not a system at all – we have no visibility across it.
Poor health and a poor health system cost Australian business $32 billion every year.
Healthcare is one of the fastest rising areas of Government expense. It already costs taxpayers approximately $100 billion per year, equivalent to 10% of GDP. And health expenditure is growing faster than GDP. Within 20...
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Tue 28th June 2011 by
After three years, Google has thrown in the towel and canned its Google Health online offering. Google cancelling a service is nothing new: the company is known for throwing projects at the wall and seeing what will stick.
Despite this commendable bent towards experimentation and innovation, it’s interesting Google’s Health service hasn’t taken off, despite being restricted to US citizens.
The rationale behind Google Health was simple. A patient, or their caregiver, stored vital health statistics in a universally accessible (to those with the...
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Mon 6th June 2011 by
Last week’s MJA paper about social media and the medical profession stands as a warning for practitioners and students wanting to, or already have, leapt into the world of Twitter and Facebook.
Many of the warnings are sensible: be mindful of patient-practitioner boundaries, ensure professional standards are maintained, and so on.
However it does raise the question of whether there is a place for social media as a positive force within the medical profession.
We already know patients find it useful as a means of obtaining information...
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Thu 12th May 2011 by
Amongst welcome information about funding for mental health, hospitals and dental treatment, the federal budget was largely silent on ehealth. The question is whether this is a good thing? As it stands, we pretty much know where ehealth is going in this country – we have 12 first- and second-wave PCEHR (Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records) sites aimed at enrolling half a million Australians in what’s probably their first electronic healthcare record. We also know the government is spending $467 million to roll out the PCEHR...
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Thu 14th April 2011 by
Recently, due to an oversight on my part, I ran out of repeats on a couple of critical scripts. I hadn’t had a chance to see my consulting physician (specialist), and my regular GP is just impossible to see on short notice, even in an emergency.
So I rolled up to the local bulk-billing medical centre to ask the doctor, who didn’t know me from a bar of soap, for some repeats.
After waiting an hour at 7am, I got in to see the friendly GP and told him the nature of my condition, as well as the medicines I needed. As back-up, I took the...
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Thu 14th April 2011 by
It’s no secret mental health is one of the most fragmented, and under-funded areas of Australia’s health system. Leaving aside the politics of funding for another day, can ehealth help people with a mental illness get better treatment and have longer periods of wellness?
The premise of ehealth in the Australian context is the creation of a personally controlled electronic healthcare record (PCEHR). The government is spending half a billion dollars on it, and it will be available to anyone that wants to register for one from July 1 next...
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