Frost & Sullivan have forecasted that the revenue for Health IT market will increase by another $333 million by 2014 over the $525 million revenue which was achieved in 2009. This will be mainly due to the several national and state funded initiatives promoting the implementation of a National E-Health System.
Dr. Pawel Suwinski, the director of Frost & Sullivan, said that this growth prediction for the Australian Health IT market is mainly due to the strong commitment of the central government towards creating a national healthcare information highway which will promote safer, efficient, and more equitable care through a flawless health information exchange (HIE). As part of the initiative, in the year 2005, the National E-health Transition Authority (NeHTA) was established for mapping out the most suitable strategy plan implementing countrywide e-health infrastructure and services.
The Australian state governments are aggressively campaigning for a technological evolution within their local healthcare system. State wide campaigns like the “careconnect.sa” web portal have been developed by South Australia, and it will be the first integrated state wide electronic health record system.
In a release, Suwinski said, "The e-health initiative has recently received a much needed boost in the form of AUD 466.7million budget commitment (passed on 11/05/2010) for the next 2 years to support plans for the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system developed to promote health information exchange between different stakeholders responsible for care management and delivery within the entire healthcare value chain. It is estimated that this investment could generate AUD 7.6billion of benefits annually by the year 2020 as reported by Booz & Company; more than 65 percent would be achieved by eradicating medical errors and complying with best practices – enhancing quality.
It is therefore obvious that seeing through the initial investment is the most important task as many healthcare IT initiatives are plagued with failures resulting from poor management and lack of commitment and involvement by the major stakeholders. Judging from the current progress, Australia is wading exceptionally well through all the pitfalls of nationally launched IT initiatives, and the passing by Parliament on 24th June the Healthcare Identifiers Services bill is keeping up the momentum in the right direction.”
Carolyn John is a Contributor to HealthTechZone. To read more of her articles, please columnist page.Edited by
Erin Monda
