While the National eHealth Transition Authority (NeHTA) has come under fire for repeatedly failing to deliver e-health projects on time -- such as the implementation of a national Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) -- CHW has been working on its own decade-long electronic record journey based on Cerner.

"We've got a full electronic medical record integrated, which means we've got things such as, electronic ordering, electronic patient scheduling, results reporting including pathology," he says.

"What we do as part of the electronic medical record is scan the paper afterwards as well so we've got document imaging. That's integrated into the personal record of each patient so our transition from paper to data can be done over time... As paper is taken away and it becomes data, then we'll no longer scan the paper."

Vargas is quick to sympathise with the challenges NeHTA faces. He points to challenges with accessibility to an e-record system. "We've been at this for 10 years so it's probably been a 15 year journey now; it was about changing work practices and processes and how the system can actually enhance services and assist clinicians in patient care," he says.

"There are smart support decisions behind it and what we're finding now is our clinicians are driving requirements to the extent that our resources do not allow us to keep pace with the requirements because there's more demand for the new things to be done and our resources are limited."