Half a million people have signed on to the personally-controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) system eHealth, according to the Federal Health Department.

Health Minister Tanya Plibersek announced during an address at a recent health conference that 520,000 people have registered to control their own health records through the service; “The government set a goal to have about half a million patients on the national e-health records system by the middle of this year. Not only did we meet this goal, we’ve exceeded it,” she said.

That may not be strictly accurate, though the numbers are extremely high, the Government’s target was for 500,000 by the end of the financial year – on June 30 the service reportedly had closer to 400,000 accounts.

There have not been any official figures on how many people are actively using the system, which stores a summary of a patient’s medical history, list of medications prescribed and dispensed, allergies, hospital discharge reports, organ donor status, advanced care planning details, summaries of individual patient health events, Medicare and PBS claims data, childhood immunisation records and private notes patients make about their own health.

The National eHealth Transition Authority was charged with building the system, selecting ICT consultancy Accenture as its main contractor.

The Health Minister says plenty has been spent to make the system as useful as possible; “We’ve invested more than $160 million in general practices to upgrade their computer systems for e-health... we’ve built the Healthcare Identifier service that has created more than 22 million digital e-health passports - identifying every Australian for healthcare purposes, and we’ve built the $467 million national e-health records system, which has the potential to connect every single Australian to every single doctor in the nation," Ms Plibersek said.

A recent survey found many professionals were not as eager as patients. About 58 per cent of respondents said they would never take part in the scheme and will not be promoting its use to patients, around 29 per cent said they would be taking part but have yet to write a health summary and only 6 per cent have written health summaries for the service.