It was no surprise that the most popular story this week on Pulse+IT was our report on a workshop on secure messaging held at the HIC conference in Brisbane, where it was revealed that the National Authentication Service for Health (NASH) needed a major overhaul if it was ever going to be of any use to anyone.

Developing a useable authentication system has been a bottomless pit from which little has emerged in the decade or so that we've been covering it. As we wrote back in 2010, NASH has been an integral part of the eHealth agenda since NEHTA's inception in 2005, but where once outsourcing sounded good it quickly turned terminal, and even though the Department of Human Services came to the rescue in the PCEHR days, NASH has caused trouble ever since.