Microsoft Offers a Perspective on e-Health in Australia.

I had an nice e-mail from James Kavanagh who is a Healthcare Solution Architect, Microsoft Australia today.

He wrote (in part)

“Over the last little while there’s been a lot of speculation around the concept of personal electronic health records (and some pretty confusing announcements). I do a lot of work in that area (helping with the technical planning for Healthvault), but like you I have a strong belief that clinically led solutions built to support evidence based models of care are actually the most important investments we need to make. Those solutions may include electronic health records but more importantly need to be directed towards better coordination of care, better clinical decision making and easier flow of information around our health system.

I recently wrote a whitepaper bringing together some of the work of Microsoft and our partners in Australia in providing solutions for chronic care. Unfortunately I still believe there’s just not enough focus on targeting e-Health towards people with chronic conditions and as a result I don’t think people really understand the value of e-Health to the population that would get the most advantage from it.

I’ve attached the whitepaper if you’re interested, and if you think it’s worthwhile then please feel free to consider publishing it on your blog.”

You can link to it directly at:

http://download.microsoft.com/documents/australia/health/Whitepaper_Caring_for_people_with_chronic_conditions.pdf

I think James makes some interesting points here and provides some interesting perspectives provided by system providers both here and overseas.

Only one nit (Page 4).

The urgent need to focus on chronic disease

The burden of chronic disease is one of the greatest challenges facing the Australian health system. Our longer lives and improved ability to treat what were previously acute, fatal conditions are two contributing factors. These are compounded by modern lifestyles with increased exposure to risk factors such as smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, lack of exercise and poor diet with more than half of Australians overweight.”

I don’t think we are getting credit for actually reducing smoking dramatically over the last 20-30 years – although to the rest we have to plead guilty!

Well worth a browse. Links nicely with some of the stuff I have been writing on the “Medical Home” concept.

See here:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2010/05/we-really-need-to-work-out-how-these.html

David.