Do you remember the mobile phone in its own carry bag?  It was not quite the fashion accessory de jour, but it was a revolution at the time.  It was soon replaced by hand held mobile phones and although financially I was a little poorer for the experience, I can remember with excitement buying my first Motorola flip phone - with a battery life of about 4 hours!

Whilst our Blackberry and mobile phones of today have come a long way since then, the same can't be said of the way in which we use technology in health.

I have been Shadow Health Minister for all of about a month, so there is a lot to learn.  But it would have been the second or third meeting I had when I was warned by a respected industry "expert" not to touch the issue of e-health, it was poison.  This of course only sparked my interest, and I have read widely on the topic since.

Technology has a high uptake amongst those who are more affluent and intelligent, so in their private lives many doctors would embrace the latest sound system, laptop or GPS device.  History shows trying to encourage the same embrace in a professional setting has largely failed, despite the potential upside for doctors and patients.

If we look at the international experience, the path has been quite similar to that in Australia.  In the UK and elsewhere developments have been made, and we can learn from many of these experiences.  In the end the technology will have benefits for doctors, and that needs to be communicated.  A general practice today is generally a professionally run small business looking to make efficiencies, and those gains can be best made through technology.

The starting point should be to build on the work of many practices that have intranet arrangements and make sure we are working towards compatibility with an ultimately broader network.  People will be looking to the Federal and State Governments to help with installation and operating costs, and perhaps this will allow us to advance more quickly.  By continuing to educate and show casing best practice, we could see a quicker take up to a point where transferring electronic patient records is just the beginning of a new frontier.

The fact is there is a lot of suspicion and vested interest in e-health, and indeed a lot of ignorance.  But what most people agree on is the potential for e-health as a means of providing better patient outcomes in the 21st century.  It is amazing to think we can go into a surgery in 2008 and still have hand written notes recorded in a paper file, so there is still clearly resistance to what many would see as inevitable.

The easiest argument to dismiss in the debate around e-health is privacy.  If our starting point is that we can't overcome privacy issues, then we are dooming ourselves to failure.  It is essential to recognise no system is infallible but surely if we are to have a mature debate in a technological age capable of so much, we can placate many of these concerns.

So let's have an honest and informed debate about e-health, and start with the end in mind that we want a more efficient process capable of easing the burden on our health professionals, patients and taxpayers.

The Hon. Peter Dutton was elected as the Federal Member for Dickson in Queensland in November 2001 when, at the age of 30 he defeated Cheryl Kernot. Re-elected with an increased majority in 2004, he was appointed as Minister for Workforce Participation and promoted to Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer in January 2006. In November 2007, with the change of Government, Peter was appointed to Shadow Cabinet as Minister for Finance, Competition Policy and Deregulation, and in September 2008 promoted to his current position, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing.