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Showing posts from December 10, 2018

Australian My Health Record Will be a Failure

The Australian government is in trouble over its planned introduction of My Health Record, a centralized storage of personal medical history. Closure of the opt-out date has been pushed forward several times. There is no way the government can continue to claim that the system will be secure. This is impossible. The weak link in the chain is human. Doctors, nurses and general hospital staff will have access. They will be able to print out any one's record and take a copy home. International criticism revolves around the outdated methods to be used. The main storage medium will be PDF. Searching these for significant insights into a patient's history will be problematic. Ease of searching is paramount. Systems to be adopted in the US and China have separate computer codes for different medication, test results and diseases. This improves searching by clinicians. The FHIR system was developed in Australia but it is the only country not adopting it. As always, Australian