Telstra intends to enter e-health arena

Telstra and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) have signed an agreement to work together to launch e-health applications on a web-hosted service platform.

The announcement comes at a time when the e-health agenda in Australia is heating up following the government’s commitment earlier in the year of more than $460 million for a national e-health strategy, and the federal parliament’s recent passing of crucial enabling legislation for healthcare identifiers.

One of the biggest challenges for e-health reform is to achieve a more coherent and integrated approach to sharing information across more than 1300 hospitals, 20,000 GP and specialist practices, and 5000 pharmacies. The fragmentation of the sector’s governance regimes and ongoing turmoil in funding and organisational arrangements make top-down reform a tough game that will be played out over decades.

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Ovum makes the following comments:

One of the biggest challenges for e-health reform is to achieve a more coherent and integrated approach to sharing information across more than 1300 hospitals, 20,000 GP and specialist practices, and 5000 pharmacies. The fragmentation of the sector’s governance regimes and ongoing turmoil in funding and organisational arrangements make top-down reform a tough game that will be played out over decades.

In this context it is also attractive to look for ways to accelerate bottom-up interoperability, which is all about the clinical and practice-management systems implemented in medical practices. Upgrading these systems and orchestrating them to produce a national e-health symphony is a huge task, but cloud computing is starting to be recognised as a potentially viable way of encouraging adoption of the next generation of standardised interoperable systems.

Telstra is looking to offer medical practitioners the benefits of the latest application functionality and standards-based interoperability accessed via the internet from a secure and robust cloud back end.

Australian vendors in the clinical-care and practice-management systems landscape include among many others Best Practice, Global Health, Health Communication Network (HCN), Houston Medical, Intrahealth, iSoft, Jam Software, LRS Health, Smart soft, Intracore, Medilink, Meditech, and Zedmed. Global vendors are also present in the market.

Many are moving their systems online, and some, such as Intracore with its Online Practice Management Studio, already have SaaS offerings. Telstra has some toe-in-the-water experience with its T-Suite SaaS portal, but it will need to come up with a much more compelling offering to create momentum in the fragmented e-health market.

In our view, the key will be to provide integration benefits in addition to those from simply plugging GPs into a robust computing utility. Piecemeal solutions will hardly be compelling enough for GPs to switch from their existing approach, so Telstra will need to orchestrate an integrated suite of SaaS offerings preconfigured to align and stay aligned with the standards and interoperability requirements of the national e-health strategy, and also leverage its communications strengths in areas such as telehealth.

Telstra is wise to stake out its claim early in the emerging e-health cloud services market because the sector is at the start of a major phase of technology renewal. While it is not yet clear exactly how, where and when cloud services will gain traction with medical practices, the winners will be those that occupy the territory nationally and learn fast.