There are already numbers of health IT projects under way or in the planning stages. For instance, the government says it will start the bidding for development of a national electronic database of Australia's health records early next year in a project called HealthConnect. According to one estimate, the development of online health systems in Australia is worth more than $450 million.

Meanwhile, participants in the Pharmaceutical Electronic Commerce and Communication (PeCC) initiative are building Australia's first industry-wide B2B Internet trading community in an attempt to harness supply chain management (SCM) to the task of slamming the lid on burgeoning costs in Australia's $45 billion-odd health sector (see "PeCCing Order", CIO November, 2000). PeCC, facilitated and administered by the CSIRO, is the first project of its type in Australia to try to revamp an entire industry supply chain to take advantage of Internet and Web-based technologies. The project is based closely on the supermarket model, where products are barcoded and scanned on purchase. PeCC is funded by a number of government agencies and many industry participants and associations. There is also work in progress across Australia on systems designed to achieve better management of health information and use of information technologies. There are numbers of projects aimed at better coordinating care, evidence-based medicine, more streamlined messaging and billing practices and the use of online technology for the remote delivery of services. Many hospitals have plans to develop fully integrated information systems and are already using videoconferencing and related technology to provide a range of services for patients, professionals and communities who are distant from the hospital.

Meanwhile, CHIC is working on Project Clearing House, aimed at examining previous successful and unsuccessful IT projects in order to provide some recipes for success. McGill says most private health groups are focusing on IT rationalisation, refresh and upgrade, with Mayne Health fairly and squarely focused initially on administrative, financial transaction-related systems. Still, with patients increasingly demanding better access to their own health information, and with more IT-savvy clinicians now working in the health care sector, clinical systems will be an early second priority. vDiagnosis: Information Sickness The vital signs of IT companies focusing on health care solutions are improvingThe 1999 Collaborative Health Informatics Centre (CHIC) report, "E-Health: An Exploratory Study of Health IT in Australia and New Zealand", found insufficient funding from health providers had left IT companies with little opportunity for new product development. According to CHIC CEO Anne McGill, one motivation for both the 1999 and 2000 reports was to provide major multinationals "who are sniffing at Asia-Pacific and Australia as a region to develop their markets" an overview of the market as a basis for business planning. She says there is some evidence such companies are finally starting to see Australia as a potentially more lucrative market. "For instance, the largest health IT company in the world, McKessonHBOC, a US-headquartered, publicly-listed company, has recently acquired an Australia health call centre company called High Performance Health Care as part of establishing a beachhead in the Asia-Pacific region. It has now established McKessonHBOC Asia Pacific, headquartered in Sydney, from which to lead its push into the health IT sector in Australia and the Asia-Pacific," she says.

"Now, as part of that, they seriously wanted to get a handle on this market: the potential of the market, the current competitors, the size of the market, the key issues and the trends were of direct relevance to them." The 192 IT companies responding to the CHIC 2000 survey are predominantly small businesses, with a few large mostly international players. This is consistent with the Australian IT sector as a whole and has changed little since the 1999 CHIC study, although the respondent group is much larger, according to the report. IT services are provided by most responding IT companies (64 per cent), with administration software (46 per cent), and clinical software (38 per cent) continuing to be the largest sectors of the health software industry.

Some 48.7 per cent of IT vendors export goods and services and 52 of the 192 companies export products/services into overseas health-sector markets including New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the US and the UK. The report calls the market wide open, and says that enterprise-wide solutions will represent the greatest opportunity for IT companies in the health sector. IT companies will need to consider combining hardware, software and solutions (including integration solutions) to maximise revenues in this sector. Small- and medium-sized software companies should consider partnering or collaborating with IT solution provides, the report says. McGill notes there have been at least seven listings of Australian health IT companies on the stock exchange in the past 18 months, raising more than $120 million.