Ken Harvey wrote: > So are these last year's "weasel words" or do they represent an ongoing > plan to build HealthConnect from the grass-roots [small State projects] > up to an interoperable shared national summary electronic health record?
According to this article in the SMH ( http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/health-records-develop-complications/2006/01/30/1138469633761.html ), the budget for the two NSW HealthConnect pilots (under the moniker Health-e-Link) is $19m. The pilots are supposed to include about 60,000 kids in greater Western Sydney, and several thousand people with chronic and complex conditions in the Hunter region. Presumably at least some of the pilot infrastructure could be used to scale up to a population-wide EHR, but nevertheless, it clearly isn't going to be cheap - although such costs need to be seen within the context of an annual NSW Health budget of over $9b. I recall Craig Knowles (several years and two Health Ministers ago now) mentioning a figure of $110m for a state-wide EHR for NSW in several public addresses which he made on the topic. Seems like that might be at the lower end of the true price range. Anyway, it will be most interesting to see how the NSW pilots go - they are currently due to start in March 2006. I also draw your attention, once again, to this item, with respect to the apparent changes in the vision for HealthConnect: http://improbable.typepad.com/improbable_research_whats/2006/01/progress_in_a_t.html Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
