We’ve been covering how the new health care overhaul is being implemented online here in America, but other places have had similar systems in place for years. In fact, in Australia, digital medical records and other health care technologies have been in the pipeline for over a decade. 

Like the U.S., Australia has a health care system that is a mix of public and private. In Australia’s universal system, patients, providers and insurers each get their own unique code that is recognized by a massive computerized information framework. 

Jane Halton, chair of the executive board at the World Health Organization, played a key role in putting that framework together. She says the growing field of personalized medicine and genomics will pose a great technological challenge to how information is digitized in the future. 

“I think that the volume of information that is potentially available and that will be material in the health care environment — that will be the vast challenge that every country will start to face.”

Jane Halton, chair of the executive board at the World Health Organization, joined Marketplace Tech host Ben Johnson to discuss. Click the audio player above to hear more.