Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is true. I certainly think that this effort will probably earn Minister Roxon a very, very big promotion, given that implementing successfully is a black mark against you in this government.

The coalition has long had a supportive attitude to e-health. Ten years ago we began the process of getting Australia an e-health program. The groups that will particularly benefit from this are people with chronic illness who need frequently to go to doctors and specialist for tests and who need frequently to tell their health professionals what has been done. In the end, this program is the first step towards a system which can be automatically brought up on their computer. We are currently in a situation where this cannot now proceed from 1 July. This is entirely in the hands of the government and Minister Roxon. Even if it were to proceed, there is absolutely no confidence anywhere that it is going to work. As I said, a month out, Medicare had not been signed up as the contract service provider.

During estimates, I asked questions on this area. In early June NEHTA, the National E-health Transition Authority, had finally managed to get itself sufficiently sorted out to invite medical software companies to tender and to get involved in the process of providing the software. On 6 June they had signed up three companies out of a potential 200. Had the trials happened? No. We kept being told that NEHTA had trialled the identifier systems with Medicare in a practice environment but there had been no real testing. Yet every medical software developer in the country has said, ‘You’ll need at least six months of live testing to have any confidence that what you are going to do will work.’

In the middle of this we already have concerns about Medicare wrongly sending out information, wrongly advising GPs of tests and getting the current Medicare numbers confused, let alone using a system that is meant to be more sophisticated than they currently have. I want to give you a sense of the size of this. I asked for an idea of what was going to be involved. The list goes like this: 100 million GP consultations, 100 million GP prescriptions, 200 million medications dispensed, 40 million GP pathology requests, 60 million pathology reports to GPs, 10 million GP imaging requests, 10 million imaging reports to GPs, eight million GP specialist referrals, and eight million specialist reports to GPs. That just begins to give you the scope of what this system is designed to deal with.

They cannot get themselves to stay long enough to get their own legislation through. They cannot get their medical software industry consulted in a timely fashion. Why would we believe that they could ever implement this system correctly? We agree with the Pharmacy Guild and the AMA that we should just get on with this. If there are problems with it, let’s fix them and just get on with passing this legislation and getting the system going. But how can we?