This week saw a major move forward for eHealth in Australia with the news that Sullivan Nicolaides Pathology will now be routinely uploading pathology reports to the My Health Record for patients whose doctors request tests electronically.

It's not just the addition of information of real worth to patients and their record that is the breakthrough. There is also the potential spur it might give to the wider use of electronic ordering of diagnostic tests in general. While eOrders aren't new – SNP's CEO Michael Harrison told us that about 80 per cent of orders coming from GPs these days are now done electronically – it will hopefully influence specialists, who tend to order more complex tests but who also tend to use their computers to write a request and then print it out, to also send them electronically.