An Exploration of e-Health in the Public Sector: The Australian Perspective

The Australian government has been actively exploiting information technology (IT) to enhance the provision of e-services to its citizens. Electronic-health (e-health) is one of the e-government services, it leverages on the use of the Internet, portals and mobile devices to provide, enhance and facilitate health care related services. Eysenbach (2001, p.20) defines "e-health as an emerging field in the intersection of medical informatics, public health and business, referring to health services and information delivered or enhanced through the Internet and related technologies". Due to the benefits of increased efficiency of health information delivery processes and accessibility from citizens of health care services, the Australian government is increasingly investing in the development of e-health services. Australian E-health services have been classified into three categories: (1) remote healthcare for the delivery of health services to citizens in remote areas of this vast country; (2) mobile healthcare service aimed at reaching people at any time and any where; (3) e-hospital, which utilises a medical record system that offers optimal efficiency in hospital management system to deliver services (Min, et al, 2007). This paper will explore the development of e-health services at three levels of administration in Australia, the Federal, State and Local, using Layne and Lee's (2001) model. It will extend the discussion by depicting the maturity of e-health services for each level of government's administration in Australia. The paper aims to provide an overview of e-health as a component of e-government in Australia and its stages of development at all levels of administration to understand the duplications, useful links and bundled services.