Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Boothby, who is a medical doctor. His contribution to health policy in the parliament is much valued by all of us. The government committed in the budget $485 million over four years to reboot the personally controlled electronic health record to clean up another the disastrous messes left to us by Labor. This is a significant investment: $485 million over four years to get this right. I am talking about a Labor failure nowhere writ larger than the e-health record. This is an exciting, meaningful microeconomic reform that will make a difference not just to people's health but also to the economy more broadly and allow us the innovation in delivering health that we know is coming down the track over the next 10 to 15 years. What we inherited was, yes, an electronic health record, but fewer than 10 per cent of Australians had signed up to it. People who listening to this broadcast might think, 'Wow, do I have an electronic health record?'. Yes, you have a unique identifier number, but unless you activate that and your health record gets attached to it then the facility that it provides is not working for you or for the health system generally.

What we have said we will do is move to an opt-out system whereby everyone by default is signed up to an e-health record. We are going to call it My Health Record, underscoring the fact that it is about the individual—their ownership of the health record and the need for them to have their say over what is on it and what is not. This goes to people's privacy concerns and it also goes to who gets access to the health record and on what occasions. We are moving to two significant opt-out trials. We are not sure where they might be but I note the member for Boothby's interest. We are going to make sure that it is working well in two significant regions of Australia before we launch what will be the national My Health Record, under which everyone will have a health record and their information will be on it. We know that we will have support on all sides of the House because this was Labor's idea; they just did not do it very well.

Consider somebody who turns up in the emergency department of the local hospital a bit disoriented and not sure what is wrong them, with their Medicare card but nothing else. That card can link to their e-health record and the admitting doctors can find out what their condition is, what life-saving treatments are required and what their entire health experience has been. How important is that? Even for a person who, like any of us, might go into hospital and come out, we know that the transition from primary care back into step-down community care and back to your GP just does not work well. How many times has somebody gone to their GP surgery on Monday morning to say, 'I was in in hospital over the weekend', expecting their GP to know all about it and in fact the GP does not, because the communication is clunky and does not work well?

I was surprise to find in my research on e-health that there is a major hospital in one of our major cities that is all paper based. Nothing whatsoever is done on computer. Come on: we need to move health into the modern world. But I was delighted to visit a new regional hospital—and I am not going to name where any of these facilities are—where a nurse who comes in and sees the patient in bed can pull out a computer from the wall and write the observations there and review which medicines the doctor has prescribed—and the pharmacist has an input as well. It is clean, coordinated, sensible and, when you consider that it will then feed into the wider e-health record for the patient as a whole wherever they travel and through whatever aspect of the health system across Australia, it is really exciting. I thank the member for Boothby and make the point that it has been estimated that this fully functioning e-health system, while improving health outcomes for patients, could save taxpayers $2.5 billion a year within a decade by reducing inefficiencies and could certainly save state governments an additional $1.6 billion annually.

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