It’s not a lack of GP enthusiasm that stalls new technology uptake in primary care, says RACGP president Dr Michael Wright.
While most GPs are keen to make use of new technology, they tend to get hamstrung by a lack of funding and lengthy bureaucratic processes, delegates at a primary care conference have heard.
Presenting at the Australasian Institute of Digital Health’s digitally connected primary care conference in Sydney on Tuesday, RACGP president Dr Michael Wright said his first foray into digital health had been less than auspicious.
“My dad was a GP, and one of my earliest experiences was converting a practice that I worked at with my dad from paper records to computerised,” he said.
“We pulled all the paper records down, and they ended up sitting in a storeroom for about eight years.
“And then we then worked out that we could get rid of most of them after seven years, but we had to keep all the ones for people who are under 18, so there’s a big filtering process.
“I feel that conversion was a little bit traumatising, but we only had to do it once. Since then, I’ve been a great supporter of digital health.”
One of the more successful digital health advancements for GPs, Dr Wright said, was simply “putting computers on … desks” and opening the way for computerised prescribing.
The actual process of converting practices to fully computerised prescribing, though, would take years – and it wasn’t because GPs were uninterested.
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“In order to enable us to write computerised prescriptions and to stop writing paper duplicates, it took eight years of negotiations with all the state and territories for them to change their legislation,” Dr Wright said.
“It takes time, but we can do it.”
In this year’s Health of the Nation survey, Dr Wright said, around 80% of GPs said they supported innovations. At the same time, they identified key barriers to uptake as being a lack of time, a lack of money and an abundance of red tape.
“[It is the] regulations and compliance and added administrative burden that make us not want to take up [new technology],” he said.
“An example of that is the challenges with the telephone authority prescription system, which is one of the ones that the GPs mentioned as an area where we have a real challenge.”
Dr Wright also cited “a real optimism” among GPs about the digital health tools of the future and said there was a “willingness to commit”, so long as there was proper support.
The college, he said, would be focusing on prioritising digital health for general practice and looking at how to best use the enormous datasets that these new tools can generate.
“We’ve got these qualitative measures of what happens in general practice, but often we don’t quantify things,” Dr Wright said.
“It’s harder to measure, but there’s a real hope that by producing better data from general practice, potentially from AI scribes, that we will gain better insights that will not only help us manage the patient in front of us, but also help us manage the population.
“From a college and GP point of view, it can help us by showing the evidence of the value that we provide in general practice, which I think often gets overlooked.”
The AIDH Digital Primary Care Conference was held on 21 October 2025 at Amora Hotel Jamison Sydney.
