Oz gummint to empty another money-truck into e-health records

Having failed to attract Australians to e-health records in any significant numbers, the cash-strapped federal government is going to pour nearly half a billion into “rebooting” the strategy.

Health minister Sussan Ley announced over the weekend that under this week's federal budget, Australia's Personally-Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) would be renamed MyHealth Record.

It's hoped that this, along with AU$485 million, will find a home for a puppy nobody really cares about.

With less than 10 per cent of Australians willing to subject their health records to government storage and access bothering to register for the opt-in PCEHR, Ley said the new record would be opt-out rather than the current opt-in arrangement.

The 2013 Royle report into the PCEHR cited the UK (the only government Australia looks to for its tech how-tos, apparently) experience that an opt-out system swept up nearly 99 per cent of people.

There was no word from Ley on whether the effectively-eternal availability of records to law enforcement would be revisited, or whether individuals opting out can have their data deleted.

The government will also dissolve the bureaucracy charged with promoting the rollout, the National E-health Transition Authority (NEHTA), replace it with a new bureaucracy, the Australian Commission for eHealth, and set up a transitional taskforce to manage the transition from the NEHTA to the new commission (you down in the back row, stop giggling).

The PCEHR has long been a troubled project. It hit hurdles from the start, with software incompatibilities stalling its early trials.

As well as a delay because of firewall policies in 2011, the system had trouble coping with apostrophes or hyphens in patient names.

The now-doomed Transitional Authority 1.0 reported in 2014 that users' records could collide, accidentally creating links from one individual's account to another. ®