More than 7000 healthcare practitioners now use Argus

Argus recently celebrated another milestone with more than 7000 healthcare practitioners using Argus for secure messaging of clinical information. This figure is significant because the majority of these users are GPs, specialists and allied health providers in the community, using Argus to send clinical reports between one another in the care of their patients.

Rather than being used as a single channel of communication such as pathology or radiology e-reporting to referring doctors, Argus is now adopted by more medical practitioners for more diverse clinical communications than any other clinical messaging method in Australia. This also includes discharge summaries sent from public hospitals, radiology reporting, pathology reporting and communication of referrals.

"The Argus messaging community of healthcare practitioners is now achieving what eHealth planners have been seeking for years", Mr Ross Davey, CEO of ArgusConnect said. "That is, genuine day-to-day use of electronic messaging of reports by a large body of doctors and allied health workers as a solid foundation for more ambitious eHealth initiatives. You can only move forward with such high benefit initiatives like the Individual eHealthcare Record (IEHR), electronic transfer of prescriptions or electronic care planning tools after you have a large body of doctors happily using eHealth facilities in their day to day work."

With commitment to promote use of Argus by more than 50 Divisions of General Practice across Australia, it is expected that this figure of users will grow rapidly as more and more specialists and allied health workers realise the benefits of sending their reports to GPs electronically. They save money, they reduce the risk of lost reports, and GPs are pleased to reduce their filing costs by receiving reports electronically.

"We are seeing more and more GPs preferentially referring to specialists and allied health practices that can offer electronic return of reports" Mr Davey said. "This is because sending of reports electronically is now becoming another factor in assessing quality of service of a specialist, allied health or diagnostic services practice."

Because Argus still has a greater than 50% growth potential of new users in the existing committed Divisions of General Practice areas, there is a strong expectation that Argus users will exceed the 10,000 practitioner mark before the end of 2009.