Stories about: Department of Health

IBM has signed a one year extension to its contract with Medicare for the provision of IT infrastructure services.

The U.K. government has shelved IT projects worth at least £273 million (AUD$664 million) during the last five years, MPs have revealed.

Almost a year has passed since a change of guard placed NSW CIO Emmanuel Rodriguez in charge of driving the state government's most ambitious ICT procurement, planning and expenditure program, which aims to slash IT spend by $565 million in the four years to July 2010.

The NSW Attorney-General's Department has deployed a new Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) to cut costs from disparate IT systems and better manage its corporate data.

Objective has won a contract with the South Australian Government to supply a document management system for the state's Department of Health.

It's been about three years since San Diego's five major hospitals first convened to discuss sharing electronic medical record data in an effort to improve diagnoses, reduce errors and improve the quality of patient care. The group held several meetings and entered discussions with a vendor as a possible corporate sponsor -- and that was that.

The New South Wales' Department of Health was recently named a laureate of the 21st Century Achievement awards for improving the performance of its critical healthcare information system and data warehouse.

In five years, the privacy debate over personal health records will be a over, and you and I will be storing our medical records at a central location. Why? Because the benefits of better care and less paperwork will outweigh our current fears about data breaches and inappropriate data sharing. Whether that central location will be Redmond, Mountain View or Boston will depend on whom we trust most with our medical information.

One of the reasons I enjoy covering the IT profession so much is that if you put five IT pros in a room to discuss a particular topic, you're likely to get at least six different opinions about it. So when I raised the issue of substance abuse within the IT industry in my blog last week, I fully expected to get the full gamut of reader comments. I wasn't disappointed.

Medicare is re-evaluating its ICT procurement strategy after placing its lucrative ICT contract up for renewal.

Employers in the IT sector are being warned of exorbitant medical costs for uninsured employees working on 457 visas following confirmation last week the government plans to streamline the application process.