The Australian government has spent $1.97bn since the system was introduced as the e-health record in 2009My Health Record: almost $2bn spent but half the 23m records created are emptyA decade since it was first announced, the federal government has spent close to $2bn on its troubled My Health Record system, and half of the 23m records created lie empty almost a year after the government made the system opt-out. “This includes the infrastructure development, implementation and ongoing operation of the My Health Record (formerly known as the personally controlled electronic health record system), and the operations of the digital health foundations (including Healthcare Identifiers and the National Authentication Service for Health) upon which the My Health Record system has been built,” a spokeswoman for the department said. More than 90% of Australians have a My Health Record created for them, but just over half of those records have anything in them – of the 22.65m records, 12.9m have data in them. And less than half (41%) of pathology and diagnostic imaging services are registered to use the health record. “To receive ePIP payments a practice is required to, among other things, upload an average of five shared health summaries to the My Health Record per full-time GP per quarter,” he said.

Source: The Guardian January 22, 2020 16:30 UTC