An overview of E-health development in Australia

This chapter is a discussion of e-health development in Australia. The Australian government has been very proactive in e-government and applications of e-government such as e-health in the last five years. E-health is an important application of e-government in Australia for innovation of the public sector, as well as due to its very sparsely populated large rural areas. E-health development in this chapter is analysed using Layne and Lee's (2001) e-government development model due to the similarities in the stages of development of both applications. This chapter illustrates that in Australia e-health development is mostly at the informational stage. It also indicates that e-health developments can be established in four stages of information; transaction; vertical and horizontal integration of services.