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A significant driver of change in hospital use of information management
and communications tools for clinical care lies in the drive for quality and
safety. A worrying level of adverse events are associated with medical
treatment, with around eight per cent of hospital utilisation occurring as a
result of potentially preventable adverse events. Adverse events are often
associated with problems in information flows across the boundaries
between different episodes of care, or between hospital and community
care, or because of discontinuity in the provision of care.
Hospital supplies involve significant wastage and delays, and a major
change in supply chain relationships is being promoted by electronic
procurement systems. St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne has already
achieved significant improvements in cost and timeliness through
electronic procurement, and the Pharmaceutical E-commerce and
Communications project has done significant work on the architecture
and standards necessary for widespread adoption of electronic
procurement of hospital supplies. The Commonwealth Department of
Health and Aged Care has recently commenced a major mapping exercise
of practice in this area across Australia.
New information channels to the public
A significant development in the health industry over recent years has
been the rapid growth in the use of the electronic media to communicate
with the public. Mainstream media lifestyle programs have supplemented
advertising messages by public health agencies and pharmaceutical
companies aimed directly at the public. More recently, the use of
interactive media such as the Internet and telephone call centres for
information dissemination and response to consumer queries has
experienced explosive growth.
Whilst many of these channels build on traditional medical encyclopaedia
and other print forms of consumer information, the volume of
information available and the capacity to customise information delivery
to consumer queries is producing a qualitative change which heralds a
new ‘direct to consumer’ health service channel.
Examples of this are:
• the Commonwealth Government’s HealthInSite initiative, which is
establishing a quality-controlled health information Internet site for
the Australian health consumer;
• the West Australian government’s HealthDirect call centre which is
designed to divert 80 000 consumer telephone queries a year from
hospitals; and
• the National Heart Foundations Heartline call centre consumer
information service.
There has been a dramatic growth of pharmaceutical advertising direct to
the consumer (DTC), largely through television. In the US, DTC drug
advertising has doubled in the last year. In Australia the trend is also
evident but less marked than in the US, in part because of the stringent
controls on advertising contained in the Broadcasting Services Act.
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