Transforming Healthcare in Australia: The PeCC Initiative

Many of the current crises in contemporary healthcare management centre on issues concerning information management and costs. Electronic commerce (or e-commerce) activity, grounded in the development of the Internet, is challenging traditional management models and providing new paradigms and possible solutions for improved health care management. Australia’s health industry, like other economic sectors here and globally, is grasping the need to use IT and telecommunications with e-commerce strategies for improved cost-effective services to its key stakeholders. This paper addresses the changes occurring in Australia’s health care industry influenced by trends in information systems. While the Federal government’s recent report, From Telehealth to E-Health: The Unstoppable Rise of EHealth [3], outlines a diverse range of projects and practices, here the authors focus on Australia’s first Internet trading community, The Project Electronic Commerce and Communication for Healthcare, otherwise known as PeCC. This study is supported by an ARC Collaborative Grant. The Industry partner is IBM.