The Australian Financial Review Article of the 13th April, 2007 entitled “National e-health would save $30bn” by Julian Bajkowski makes a few comments I really don’t think should go through to the keeper.
The article states:
“The study has increased pressure on the federal government to abandon a number of failing federal electronic initiatives, including the $128 million HealthConnect project, which has yet to deliver tangible results.”
I would suggest this is wishful thinking as we see the grossly overfunded non-strategic trials which are being still being conducted by HealthConnect SA and HealthConnect Tasmania. It would be good however if this was an outcome and they were canned.
The article states:
“ Doctors, clinicians and hospitals have long sought electronic health and medical records that could be used across Australia's different state health systems.”
This really misses the mark. Most care (95%+) is delivered within a patient’s local area and virtually all care is delivered in the state of a patient’s residence. Doctors would be very keen to see records for their patients able to be used between the local practice, the local hospital and the local investigatory providers. The rest would be a cherry on the icing on the cake I would contend.
The article states:
“But developing the standards has been a battle because of a series of bitter quarrels between technology suppliers and standards bodies.”
This is largely just wrong. Between NEHTA and Standards Australia’s (SA) Health IT working parties there have been tensions and a lack of quality two way communication – but the Health IT industry has, for the most part, very good relations with SA. Relations between the Health IT industry and NEHTA are dodgy, at best, despite anything NEHTA may say.
The article states:
“NeHTA recently recruited the former head of Queensland-based Cooperative Research Centre for the Distributed Systems Technology Centre, Mark Gibson, as its chief technology officer.
The hiring represents a coup as it will ease NeHTA's access to a vast repository of e-health-related intellectual property held in trust by the shareholders of DSTC after the group's funding was terminated by the federal government in 2005.”
While not commenting on this particular appointment directly, I seriously doubt there is much useful intellectual property held in trust by DSTC given the failed and never properly reported HealthConnect trials it was involved in.
I hope these comments assist in understanding where things currently sit.
David.
0 comments:
Post a Comment