Last week the Department of Health and Aging released its report to support Australia's first National Primary Healthcare Strategy.  This is an important report to read for those interested in Consumer e-Health.  You can download a copy of the report from  http://www.yourhealth.gov.au/internet/yourhealth/publishing.nsf/Content/nphc-draftreportsupp-toc .

There are two important things to take home from this report.  The first is there is a clear recognition throughout the report that e-health technologies, including web based information sources, mobile computing systems and online health records are vital elements that need to be further developed to better engage consumers in better maintaining their health.  This is not only discussed in the chapter dedicated to e-health (Element 6 of the report), but also inferred throughout the report when delivering on the reports objectives are discussed.

The second important consumer e-health aspect to the report is that while there is a recognition of the need for these systems there is no real detail on what they would look like or how they would be delivered.  There is some discussion regarding access to a personal health record, but again little detail on the what or the how around it. 

To me, this further emphasises the need to rapidly develop the discussion around what are the required consumer e-health systems and how we could develop and deploy them.  Unlike the professional systems that are in the spotlight now, where the roll out is gated by large capital investments from the Federal and State governments, the implementation of consumer systems are going to be driven much more by open market developed applications and the implementation will only be gated by the cost and the value that they deliver to consumers.  This is a notoriously difficult genie to control once it is out of the bottle.

If we want to make sure that Australia's health consumers have access to the applications which will really improve their ability to manage their health then we need to work out  how to create the market conditions that foster these types of applications. 

Hopefully through the Health Beyond group on the Health Hub we can develop that sort of conversation.