beyond pt 0 23/1

Section Six
Health
IT&T capabilities in most
public hospitals provide
sub-optimal support for
many hospital activities.
In fact IT usage in most
hospitals appears to be at
least a decade behind many
commercially oriented
organisations. Furthermore,
current capabilities would
provide negligible support
for the anticipated clinical
care and business processes
inherent in an integrated
health care model.
Victorian Department
of Human Services (1996)
6.1 Description of the sector
The Health industry is a service industry characterised by its hugely varied
service types, high proportion of independent professional providers and
diverse and decentralised industry structure. It comprises major
multi-specialty public and private referral hospitals, small specialised
private hospitals, general district hospitals, nursing homes, and
independent medical specialists, general practitioners, allied health
professionals, community health centres and related business support and
industry associations. The majority of health services are provided by
self-employed medical practitioners operating in solo practice or in
partnership with a small number of other practitioners.
This has sometimes lead to references to health as a ‘cottage industry’ in
which individual craftsmen still fashion individual customer solutions
using a set of skills that are resistant to industrial models of organisation.
The health sector is an important part of the total Australian economy,
with private and public outlays totalling in excess of $42 billion per year.
The use of information technology in the health sector is very varied
and overall rather primitive compared with other service industries.
However powerful drivers underlie a dramatic change in the way
information is collected, managed and communicated in the health
industry. These include:
• the explosion of knowledge in medicine and biotechnology resulting in
an increasing focus on quality and evidence based treatment;
• shifts in demand from brief acute episodes of care to extended clinical
care for long term health conditions with a consequent demand for
better integration and coordination of clinical care across
organisational and temporal boundaries; and
• explosive increases in health care costs and consequent strategies to
better manage health care at both the system and health care
provider levels.
6.2 Service delivery channels and the Health Value Network
Changing patterns of health practice have put the issue of coordination
and integration of services by multiple providers at the top of the health
industry agenda. Increasing specialisation of skills and technologies among
consultants, diagnostic specialists, proceduralists and dispensers of
powerful therapeutic agents have dramatically increased information
flows among health providers. Improved treatment outcomes mean
patients live longer with continuing health problems, increasing the need
for information dissemination and retrieval among providers over a
longer time frame. The health value network is now comprised of many
suppliers of goods and services over an extended period of time. In
addition, the increasing demands of accountability for professional and
management purposes has seen a dramatic increase in record keeping and
administrative information flows.
Drug therapy constitutes an increasing proportion of healthcare
intervention, and this trend is expected to continue with the
biotechnology revolution now underway. New and more effective drugs
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