My Health Record — a flawed initiative
One of the biggest IT issues ongoing at present is the Australian Government’s My Health Record project. It was designed as an opt-in service, where you would have to explicitly provide a healthcare provider with authority to create a record on your behalf. The primary benefit of the service was that a ‘single source of truth’ copy of your medical records (or a summary of them) would be available to any health provider nationally. So if you were away from home within Australia and required treatment, your records would be available to medical professionals, who would be able to learn your medical history, allergies etc, with the idea being that you would receive better and more appropriate medical care as a result. Unfortunately, the benefits of the service were not well sold to the public, and the percentage of people …