Feature article

The Time for eHealth is now

Professor Fiona Stanley, Director, Telethon Institute for Child Health Research and
Professor Eric Meslin, Director, Indiana University Center for Bioethics and Visiting Professor at Large, University of Western Australia

26 May 2009

 

Computers have always promised the potential to make life easier and more productive for work and home. But their real power may lie in their ability to collect, store and analyse medical information to improve the public’s health.
 
Look no further than the recent threat of a global pandemic of the H1N1 (swine flu) virus  (Australian IT ‘Real-time data vital in flu fight, May 5). One of the keys to protecting the public is to find out  and sift through massive amounts of important information: who is sick, who is healthy (including members of the public and well as health care providers and first responders), who has died, where they live, where they work, where they shop and go to school, who has been admitted to hospital, how long they’ve stayed, what medicines are being prescribed by which pharmacies, and countless other pieces of information.

With a comprehensive system of eHealth (electronic health) information it would be possible for public health officials, ambulance, police, fire, and other preparedness officials  to have access to information on all suspected and confirmed cases of infected individuals with the details in real time and to be able to link all the data. Having this information would allow for efficient monitoring of the pandemic and allow for a coordinated response. Lives would most certainly be saved.

The Government of Mexico has started this process for tracking H1N1 to reassure their constituents that the best information is available to ensure the most effective response.  All hazards-preparedness offers one of the best examples of the value of eHealth.In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the only people who had accurate medical records still available (most had vanished with the flood waters from most hospitals and clinics) were those on the electronic data bases such as Veterans Health Administration kept centrally and safe on federal computers. 

But H1N1 and other natural disasters are only the most dramatic examples of the benefits of access to high quality data through a coordinated electronic system. If we had complete population eHealth data in Australia with the capacity to bring all medical information on individuals together in a personal electronic medical record two things would happen: first, individual health would improve—a personal health record would ensure that medical history, prescriptions, test results and hospital visits were accurately kept and available to physicians, pharmacists and other health care providers; second, overall community health and health services would also improve  through the unprecedented capacity to monitor all health services, to examine trends in diseases, and the effectiveness of medicines, treatments, and medical devices. Public policy would become evidence-based and transparent for all to see.

eHealth initiatives are already well underway in the United States where President Obama has committed billions of dollars to converting an aging paper-based system of medical records to an electronic system of electronic medical records, and to include a major initiative in carrying out comparative effectiveness studies of medicines. Protocols to ensure that data is kept secure and confidential already exist here. The technology exists for data security and encryption providing the public with the assurance that the public’s health and individual health can be advanced under ethical protections. Australia has every reason now for our whole health system to fast track eHealth, not just for swine flu.