What is General Practitioner (GP)

Many information technology (IT) products have been developed to support medical general practitioners (GP) in all aspects of their work (GPSRG 1998), and much research and development in this area has already been done. It is apparent, however, that GPs are not making as much use of these systems as they could. Our research had shown that there is still reluctance, in particular, from many rural general practitioners to fully implement Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in primary health care in rural Australia (Everitt and Tatnall 2003). While a simple analysis of the statistics of the numbers of computers in medical practice shows that there are computers in most general practices it is not so clear how, or even whether, they are being used. Rural GPs, however, operate very much in the mode of small business (Burgess and Trethowan 2002). Some national research shows that GPs use ICT mainly for administrative and some clinical functions but that much less use is made of online functions (NHIMAC 1999; GPCG 2001). This is even more pronounced for rural GPs.