It would be fitting to end 2024 with the view that it has been a salutary year for digital health in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, all of the markets that Pulse+IT covers. For Ireland it certainly has, but New Zealand will need a strong remedy if it is to make any progress at all in 2025.

For Australia though, it is the combination of events over two years that brings great promise to the future and bodes well for 2025 in particular. We look back to the federal budget of 2023, which put serious money into setting firm foundations underneath Australia’s digital health infrastructure, and led the way for some serious progress on interoperability.

It also took a serious step towards modernising the My Health Record system and perhaps even making it work, and on establishing the Australian Digital Health Agency on a permanent footing.

But a lot of what happened this year goes back to two presentations at the MedInfo conference in Sydney, one by ADHA CEO Amanda Cattermole and the Department of Health and Aged Care’s Daniel McCabe, and another by ADHA chief digital officer Peter O’Halloran on interoperability.

Those two presentations have since seen fruition in 2024 with the development of the Health Information Exchange (HIE), the serious work that has gone into interoperability that will see real results in the next couple of years, and the sharing by default policy.

The latter, we believe, will come to be one of the great leaps forward for health data sharing and will lay the foundation for the HIE. Sharing by default is not just about swamping the rackety old My Health Record with pathology reports, but is in fact a complete change for consumers and access to their own information.

In the future, it will be mandatory for healthcare providers to provide this in a timely, digital manner to the people who own the information. And that will be consumers, not providers, and will fundamentally change the provision of healthcare in this country.

It’s not all rosy revolutionising though. The conceptualisation of the national HIE, we believe, still needs a lot of work. There are also quite a few commercial products out there that are already able to do a lot of this work, and we do query why a commercial off the shelf product cannot be used for the foundation of the system.

We will also believe the language around the HIE and what means, which is difficult even for digital health people to understand. Sharing by default, on the other hand, makes perfect sense and is an easy sell.

Of course, the other big development is AI, and its rapid, remarkable progress has taken over almost everything else in digital health this year. What it will bring next year, who knows, such is the rapid rate of change. Regulators and experts are just scrambling to put in place guardrails – surely the word of the year for 2024 – but one suspects AI will overtake those efforts.

For New Zealand, where a severely financially constrained public sector means that it will be up to the private sector to pick up the reins with very little assistance from the government. While the private sector may think it has most of the answers, we still believe that there is a big role for legislators to play in public health. What is certain is that there won’t be any money for any big experiments.

And to Ireland, which has had a breakthrough year in digital health and looks like it will be even better in 2025. Ireland introduced its first digital health strategy this year, and is exploring intensely – and rolling out at great speed – virtual care, AI, shared care records and a whole host of technologies from what was considered a laggard in digital health maturity. 2025 should be a good one for the Irish.

Back in Australia, it’ll be fascinating to watch developments, where we seem to have more money than sense when it comes to digital health, not just on a national but state based too. A lot of interest will be on NSW and its roll out of the single digital patient record, and on Victoria, which is grappling with budget problems while still trying to link up its disparate health services through its CareSync program.

South Australia is bedding down its virtual care projects and coming to terms with the full rollout of electronic medical records after many years of trying. Western Australia has done brilliant work in virtual care, and hopefully next year, will finally go to market for a proper EMR.

The Northern Territory continues to struggle with the implementation of the new Acacia system and we wish it all the best with the very complex problems it faces. Queensland has pressed the button on the paused implementation of the Cerner digital hospital stack in Metro North, its biggest HHS, and is also doing a lot of work on virtual care, but is still struggling mightily with legacy systems that it just can’t seem to replace.

The ACT is flying along with its grand Digital Medical Record, and one hopes that Tasmania will finally reveal which vendor it has chosen for its EMR. Everyone knows that it is hoping for a similar result as the ACT has achieved so next year should hold some interesting news.

We are wrapping up our year here at Pulse+IT with our annual digital health year in review series next week, and then we’ll be going on hiatus between December 13 and January 13.

This will be the last blog for the year, and also the last blog from me. I’m moving on after 12 years in the saddle here at Pulse+IT, all of which I’ve enjoyed immensely. For those people whose stories I’ve promised to write but failed, there is still hope. Good luck to everyone for next year.

In our poll from last week we asked: Should NSW’s single digital front door be replicated around the country? Absolutely, most people said: 77 per cent voted yes. We also asked which states would it be suitable for in the short term. Here’s what you said.