As the hoo-ha over My Health Record dies down, this week the industry turned its attention back to a problem that has dogged the Australian healthcare system for well over a decade: secure messaging interoperability, or lack thereof, and the continued reliance on paper for clinical communication between different settings.

New Zealand is well on the way to solving this problem because it primarily uses one messaging service but also because its Health Information Standards Organisation (HISO) has managed to get consensus within the industry on standards for messaging along with code sets, security and privacy. New Zealand also has the benefit of a mature National Health Index (NHI) patient identifier and its associated health practitioner index.