Will the Australian national e-health network survive the hung parliament?

Australia’s peculiar political predicament - a hung federal parliament - could mean any number of things for the national e-health network. Andrew Collins talks to the experts to find out how the national network is coming along and what the future may hold.

Australia’s recent federal election saw the ALP barely holding onto power, requiring the support of one Green and several Independent MPs in the House of Representatives to form a minority government. With the Coalition gaining an extra seven seats and power redistributed across the House, will we see a lot of e-health opposition from the Coalition, resulting in inaction?

“That’s to be seen,” says Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director at analyst firm Ovum.

“It looks like these things are going to be hard to get through parliament, and they’ll be contested all the way. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, if that promotes better clarity and quality of planning, strategy and such,” he says.

This is because the e-health network must be “well formulated and well debated, assertively promoted but not to the point of being belligerent”, according to Hodgkinson.

“You could argue that the hung parliament type of situation might actually encourage a more consensus-style form of development of the next phase of the e-health strategy, which wouldn’t be a bad thing,” he says.

Deloitte’s Adam Powick, lead author of a 2008 report on national e-health strategy, which forms the blueprint for e-health in Australia, doesn’t think that ministers of the House of Representatives will move to block development of the e-health network.

“The key part of the legislation is now through [parliament], and that did get bipartisan support. It got bipartisan support in an environment coming up to an election. So if we were to see true sabotage, we would’ve see that at that point in time,” Powick says.

But Powick does believe that the national e-health network will undergo some changes, given the composition of the hung parliament.

“The one main thing that will occur is a great emphasis on rural and regional needs when it comes to e-health. One of the critical reasons we need e-health in this country is to start to address the inequality of healthcare outcomes between those in the bush and those in the cities. That’s something I’m very supportive of personally,” he says.

This is, of course, due to the influence of the independent MPs that sided with the Labor party to form a minority government.

“They’re driving a very strong rural and regional agenda, and I think e-health will be no different,” Powick says. “[It’s] an adjunct to the current program, but I think a healthy addition.”

According to Hodgkinson, it’s hard to say whether the government’s vision for an e-health strategy will survive the hung parliament, since “we don’t really know, now, what the government’s e-health proposal is”.

“We know that they’ve put $467 million on the table, and we know they’ve gone as far as getting the identifier sorted, but in truth that’s about all we know about what their actual strategy is,” he says.

Political scrapping

And what of the little that we do know? Could the hung parliament jeopardise the few building blocks that have been established?

“Well it could do, yes,” Hodgkinson says, citing the identifier system legislated earlier this year.

“[The identifier] actually doesn’t feel stable to me. It could easily just blow up, just because sufficient groundswell of concerns about the privacy issues [could] undermine it,” he says.

“Even things like that can come unravelled, for reasons not directly related to the e-health record itself, but rather for reasons more generically related to public concerns about government records and privacy,” he says.

But while particular elements of the system could be changed or removed, Hodgkinson says the national e-health network won’t be scrapped altogether.

“At a high level, there’s no question that Australia needs better integration and coherence of its health record electronic platform. There will be one of some form,” he says.

According to Hodgkinson, there are simply “different views about how to pursue it, and how much money [it should get] and how centralised it ought to be driven”, and this could affect how it’s handled in parliament.

“It could become perceived as more of an evolutionary agenda, rather than a ‘big bang’ kind of agenda. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, as long as it’s still got elements of strong national leadership to it, and working collaboratively with the many stakeholders in the sector, to advance the cause of better integration of health records,” he says.

There’s also the possibility that the parliament will not last the usual three years. According to Powick, that would be “dangerous” for the national e-health network.

“The Liberals said that they would rescind the $467 million of the electronic health record funding. Frankly, the next two or three years are the years where we’re either going to get this moving forward or we’re not,” Powick says.

“So anything that impacts the life of this government - not just because it’s the Labor party, but the fact we’ve got a government in place with a plan and a strategy - would obviously constitute a significant risk to the e-health program,” he says.

Stay tuned to VoiceandData.com.au for more on this topic!

*Andrew Collins is a freelance writer.