By far our most popular story for the week was the announcement that Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital had attained Stage 6 in the electronic medical record adoption model (EMRAM) framework developed by the US-based HIMSS, not just for its inpatient systems but for outpatients too.

While a framed certificate is all well and good if you get to hang it on your wall and it's even better if you've got two of them, the obvious question is whether an EMR is worth all of the time, effort and money put in. The total for RCH for that time and effort came to $48 million, which does make your eyes water a bit but which is pretty much par for the course these days when you take a mainly paper-based hospital to a fully digital one virtually overnight.