It seems like just yesterday that Department of Health CIO Paul Madden was taking great delight in taking the mickey out of Pulse+IT's seemingly obsessive reporting on all things PCEHR.

In fact, it was at the Rural Medicine Australia (RMA) conference in Sydney last November, when Mr Madden, responding to our question as to why most people found out about what was happening with the PCEHR through the pages of Pulse+IT rather than official channels like NEHTA or DoH itself, gently mocked us for writing about its slings and arrows so constantly.

We're still writing about it, but it's getting harder and harder to keep up the enthusiasm for what now seems to be considered a forgotten relic of previous adventures. Figures on the tiny amount of shared health summaries on the system seem to show that most GPs have lost their enthusiasm entirely. (After one year of operation, the PCEHR contained 2000 SHSs; by the end of two years of operation, this had grown to 23,000. Last December, the number was 38,200.)