Australia used to have four university departments teaching health information management, now there are only two. This is crucial for the Prime Minister's health reform. In order to implement a national funding scheme based on case mix, every hospital in Australia will have to have a number of health information managers, who can code each of the medical procedures so that they can qualify for activity based funding. Unfortunately health information managers are in even shorter supply than doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Many of those trained in Australia now work around the world as highly paid consultants, so the cost of getting those people back to Australia will not be cheap.

Added to which both the local area hospital networks and the Federal Government are going to need scores of Health Information Managers in order to be able to interpret data so that they can tell whether the system is being gamed or not. It takes four years to train a health information manager so funding for that training should be provided now, however no interest in developing the training has been exhibited by universities, and no funding has been provided for it.

It is therefore passing strange that when a senior health information manager with experience in case mix implementation in Australia and overseas rang the person notionally in charge of the new independent authority that will assess the need for activity funding and asked whether she should apply for a job he indicated he had no idea.