The following appeared this morning.
Online health deadline looming
- by: Fran Foo
- From: The Australian
- June 11, 2013
THE Gillard government must sign up more than 9600 people a day to meet its target of 500,000 registrations by the end of the month for the $467 million eHealth record system.
It took 11 months to hit the first 250,000 as of June 5. This time the government will have about three weeks to repeat the feat.
The government had aimed for half a million Australians with a personally controlled eHealth record by next month.
The last-gasp dash comes as Health Department figures show that for the first time since July last year, the number of registrations far outnumber the number of logins, meaning most people were not using the opt-in system.
At a budget estimates hearing last week, Health Deputy Secretary Rosemary Huxtable said that on June 4, there were 10,000 registrations, the highest number in a single day.
"I think that we are still in sight of that 500,000 figure," Ms Huxtable said, when asked whether the target could be achieved.
"If we go back to 2012-13, there was certainly an expectation that we would, through the eHealth sites, have people at a stage of readiness and awareness at that point," she said.
"The reality is that the development, the underpinning work that we needed to do in a technical sense, was complex and took time.
Lots more here:
What the data shows is that right now the system is not being tested in terms of high usage - to say the least.
As I commented at the end of the article:
“Health IT expert David More said there was still "a very long way to go" before the PCEHR was clinically useful and improved healthcare outcomes.
"Overall, the statistics appear to suggest that usage of the PCEHR as opposed to the registrations, which are being stimulated and sponsored by paid recruiting agents, continues to be very low, probably involving only one or two visits at most by most of those registered with a good few never bothering after registering to log on," Dr More said.”
The good news here is that we are actually getting some information on just how much usage the system is getting. Well worth a careful read!
Here are the detailed figures:
2012 | 2013 | ||||||||||
Month | Jul | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May |
Consumer Registrations | 4335 | 3843 | 3163 | 3532 | 6176 | 11193 | 17991 | 20262 | 24180 | 29415 | 84549 |
Consumer logins | 4875 | 5449 | 5489 | 9195 | 8678 | 16556 | 22616 | 27650 | 26313 | 33059 | 38610 |
What do people think this means?
David.
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