E-health in Australia: time to plunge into the 21st century.

E-health is the health care buzzword of the moment, with a person-controlled electronic health record funded in the 2010 federal Budget and legislation to introduce health identifiers recently passed by Parliament. E-health can ease the patient journey, improve quality of care and reduce costs. Australia's health care system lags behind all other sectors of our economy in the use of computerised systems.