Difficulties with the electronic medical record, paging system and pathology ordering system at Sydney's Northern Beaches Hospital (NBH) dominated headlines in the second half of the eHealth year, with a report from the NSW Health Education and Training Institute (HETI) in July finding that IT woes compounded the staffing issues that had plagued the privately operated hospital since its opening in October 2018.

The HETI report would lead to an upper house parliamentary inquiry, which found that the health information exchange supposed to be giving Northern Beaches clinicians a view into Northern Sydney Local Health District's Cerner EMR did not work, and there was no fax or internet to follow up requests. Public submissions to the inquiry complained of poor communication from the hospital, with local GPs saying they did not receive discharge summaries for six months and in one instance, 650 discharge summaries were posted to a practice months after they were written.