There are some statistics that are so photogenic that politicians cannot resist throwing them about, time after time, and sure enough, when Health Minister Tanya Plibersek told the CEDA conference today that ehealth would give Australia a great bang for its buck, she gave another workout to some figures that her predecessor, Nicola Roxon, used just a year or so ago.
The figures concern the number of hospital admissions that are medication related. According to Plibersek, the number comes to about 190,000 per year, or two to three per cent of the total admissions each year. That, she said, costs $660 million per year, which alone represents not that much less than will have been spent on the PCEHR over four years. According to the minister/s about 15,000 are due to inadequate patient information. For patients over 75, up to 30 per cent of admissions are known to be medication-related, with up to three quarters of these potentially preventable.
She used as an example a story she’d recently heard about an elderly man who collapsed in a shopping centre from “a perfectly preventable interaction between medicines”. She said that the incident occurred after the man’s GP and his specialist changed his medication independently of each other — without knowing what the other had done.
The figures she referred to come from a study by Libby Roughead, an associate professor and Dr Susan Semple, a research fellow, at South Australia’s School of Pharmacy and Medical Studies. Having already written about them, and had the ministerial application of these figures described by Keith Heale as “either ignorance or wilful misrepresentation”, I thought I’d make some enquiries at the source, so I rang Libby Roughead in Adelaide.
I’m sure the minister will be delighted to learn that according to Roughead, electronic health records “absolutely should help us address that problem”.
And she says that EHRs are also likely to be invaluable in helping with another problem: the use of drugs when patients are released from hospital. She says that one study indicated that for every two people discharged, at least one has a missing script. And while she doesn’t have figures for this, she says that the opposite is also true: patients are being discharged with drugs that they should no longer be using.
In fact, according to her, ehealth records will become even more critical as increasing numbers of allied health practitioners start prescribing.
I don’t know if some of the other figures Plibersek used are old hat, but I found the fact that “in any week, one in three Australian GPs see a patient for whom they have no current information” and more than one in five GPs face that situation every day very interesting.
She also used some figures on the duplication of tests. One study, mentioned in the journal of Clinical Pathology, indicated more than 7% of all tests ordered in a hospital’s immunology lab were unnecessary duplicates.
The speech indicated increasing awareness within government of the importance of ehealth apps.
“If we can partner with industry to create the right environment,” she told the conference, “eHealth has the potential to act as an innovation hub for app designers. And I trust if we get it right, that many talented designers out there will create new, revolutionary eHealth apps.”
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