On the whole, medical organisations and doctors have welcomed funding announced in the May Budget of nearly $467 million to begin building a secure national system for personally controlled electronic health records.

Despite the significant sum, it may surprise many that this is really only ‘seed’ funding, needed to provide the fledgling e-health sector the boost it needs to roll out trial systems around the country.

While more funds will be required over time to expand upon these trial sites and develop a fully integrated national e-health system, over time this investment will pay for itself several times over through savings in health costs and enormous gains in patient safety.

Quoted in The Australian newspaper last month, Australian Medical Association Vice-President Dr Steve Hambleton said, “Medical misadventure causes jumbo jetloads of patients to crash into the ground every year. We’ve got to save those planeloads.

“Communication failures and medication errors are a huge cause of misadventure, and better IT systems will fix that,” he said.

Unfortunately, the urgency of the situation seems to have been lost on the Federal Opposition, which announced it would reject the e-health plan if it won government.

While it hasn’t announced an alternative plan, the opposition has indicated it may allow the Healthcare Identifier Bill to pass through the Senate next month, which must occur before any progress can be made on a national e-health system.

Individual Healthcare Identifiers provide a means to consistently identify patients, healthcare providers and provider organisations. The current lack of an identifier is preventing some patient safety and quality projects from proceeding.

For example, one recent study has found an electronic health record system currently operating in Brisbane may reduce the number of adverse incidents (injury/death) in aged care residents who visit hospital. However, funding is needed to expand the program.

Such technology also has the potential to achieve significant healthcare savings.

This was emphasised in a new report that showed a national e-health system would save around $7.6 billion in health costs annually. A reduction in the number of medication errors would result in around $2.6 billion of these savings.

Savings in this order would certainly dwarf the expenditure required to set up such a system, but achieving this will demand vision and a commitment to put differences aside in the interests of better patient care.