This afternoon I attended a presentation at the North West Health Community Consultative Committee by Ms Fiona Eldridge on Queensland Health’s eHealth Program which is progressively rolling out through our health system.
Basically all our medical records are being put into electronic (digitised) form and disparate records are being brought together under Individual Health Identification Number.
It has massive implications for our medical privacy the efficiency and cost of providing health care and for the quality of information available to doctors on which to base their decisions and care plans about our health.
I remain very alarmed by the privacy implications while clearly there will be enormous benefits. We will need to lobby very hard as health consumers if we are to have a hope of a say on our rights in eHealth. We will have a right to access our eHealth records under Freedom of Information but exactly how readily we could do so is very unclear. If we thought some of the information was wrong or private and not something we wanted on an open file we’d be up against a system which is very excited by the huge value and power of the eHealth resource.