We’ve been watching the progress of the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ EHR modernisation project for quite a few years now, fascinated by what is a mammoth undertaking at a frankly quite extortionate cost. The $US16 billion project was controversial from the beginning, with an aged and yet beloved bespoke system called VistA ripped out to make way for Cerner’s Millennium EMR across numerous VA hospitals and health facilities, linked to the Department of Defense and the US Coast Guard. The first small sites went live Ohio and Washington in 2020 and immediately ran into problems, which in t ..read more

The first sitting week of the new Australian parliament got off to a roaring start on Monday, with some very fresh faces looking very pleased with themselves and a pretty good vibe that this parliament might be a little more constructive than the small target promised before the election. Most pleasing was the fast-tracking of legislation to reform the Aged Care Act, which was one of four big issues canvassed by the new government this week. The legislation had of course been written before the election but the previous government’s legislative incompetence meant it was gathering dust on the ..read more

Pulse+IT has today launched a new aged, community and disability care edition of its popular eNewsletters, featuring a weekly round-up of the latest health IT and digital health news for the sector in Australia and New Zealand. Predominantly targeting the residential and in-home aged care sectors, it will also cover the use of information technology in community care, including mental health, and disability care. Read More ..read more

The ongoing saga that is federally funded telehealth policy dominated the start of the week in Australian health IT, but at the end of it, we were hearing some pretty startling news about the direction that eHealth NSW is thinking of taking with its single digital patient record (SDPR) project. The doctors’ lobby groups managed to get the Department of Health and Aged Care to change its mind on dropping the level C telephone consult item for COVID-19 antivirals, but that is as far as the department seems will to budge at this stage. The combined wrath of the college of GPs, the AMA and even t ..read more

It was a pretty good turnout at Sydney’s Rosehill Gardens Racecourse this week for the annual ITAC conference, which was heavy on policy discussions surrounding the release of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety’s final report last year and the election of a new federal government this year that has made aged care reform one of its highest priorities. That description would normally put the fear of god into the average punter but this year, something was different. Information technology in aged care is often one of the forgotten topics in the wider health IT and digital he ..read more

The big news this week came out of the west, where WA Health has finally gone to tender for a new electronic referral solution to replace the SharePoint system it has used for many years. WA Health has a centralised referrals processing system for its metropolitan hospitals and SharePoint would have done the job in the past, but newer technology has fast overtaken it. WA Health says just over a quarter of referrals to its public hospitals are done by secure messaging and it appears faxes and letters rein supreme otherwise. It would be a surprise if the situation is any different between GPs a ..read more

To coin a phrase, time does move quite slowly in the aged care sector, but in the last decade in Australia at least, recognition that aged care has been severely ignored to the point of criminal neglect has finally filtered through. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, driven by some seriously good journalism from the ABC along with the long-term efforts of whistleblowers, has revealed what can only be described as an abject state of affairs in the residential aged care sector in Australia. And who knows what goes on it community aged and disability care. Thankfully, the Ro ..read more

The dictionary definition of a saga is an Icelandic epic narrative, a long and complicated story in which famous families do this and that over a long period of time and there is a major element of heroic exploits. The common definition is of a long and complicated story to which there seems no end. The former sounds great; the latter sounds like health IT policy in Australia. As a new federal government settles in in Canberra and a couple of state governments begin their respective roads to re-election with big-spending budgets and ministerial reshuffles, longstanding healthcare horrors lurk ..read more

Probably the biggest story in health IT this year and so far this decade has been Oracle’s enormous outlay in buying the world’s largest EMR vendor, Cerner, for 28 billion dollarydoos. Exactly what Oracle hopes to achieve with the acquisition has been a bit of a mystery, beyond the fact that Cerner is a very profitable company, with revenues of $US5.5 billion a year and net earnings of about half a billion. Cerner also has a huge amount of future earnings on its books, with the enormous US Veterans Affairs EHR project, worth eleventy billion dollars, still rolling out and a footprint in most ..read more

We here at Pulse+IT like to keep an eye on not just industry media coverage of health IT but mainstream media coverage too, and this week provided quite a few morsels. The Guardian ran one of its regular stories on the My Health Record last week and while we think it got it right in terms of balance – it reported those who were for, those who were against and those who were in between – nothing new was revealed, to be honest. The MyHR/PCEHR was launched almost 10 years ago (not 12) and it has cost upwards of $2.6 billion (not less) but otherwise the main thrust of The Guardian’s story is on t ..read more