NSW Health Continues to Grossly Underperform in E-Health.

When do you imagine we can get rid of the team running NSW Health? – to say nothing of the incompetent Government they report to.

Their effort this week as reported locally and by the ABC.

Hospital records system fails twice in one week

Posted Fri May 8, 2009 7:37am AEST

Emergency doctors at Nepean Hospital in Sydney's west are scaling back a new electronic records system because of two failures in the space of four days.

Hospital management says there was a slowdown in the system for two hours on Tuesday, following a widespread outage on Saturday.

Staff at the Nepean Hospital have now stopped using some parts of the system, saying they have lost confidence in it.

Medics will in some cases go back to using pen and paper to record patients' progress.

The chief executive of the Sydney West Area Health Service Professor Steven Boyages has apologised to staff, but says the problems could continue for a year and a half, while the technology is being rolled out.

More here:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/08/2564180.htm

and here:

Electronic medical records putting patients at risk – Nepean Hospital

Posted 07/05/2009 at 05:12 PM by StreetCorner

Staff in the Nepean Hospital Emergency Department have banned the use of the new electronic medical records system after it failed for the second time in three days on Tuesday, putting patients at risk, Shadow Minister for Health Jillian Skinner said today. According to Jillian Skinner, medical officers have revealed the latest shut down at the Nepean Hospital ED on Tuesday lasted for two hours, leading to staff deciding on Wednesday they no longer had faith in the new system.

.....

Skinner reported that emergency staff at Nepean Hospital decided yesterday to pull the pin on using electronic records and are now working with pen and paper because they don’t trust electronic medical records system.

Full article here:

http://www.streetcorner.com.au/news/showPost.cfm?bid=10391

What can one say.

The only way you can wind up in a situation like this is to under plan, under scope, under configure to local workflows and need, under test and under train your staff.

The CEO who says that staff might have to put up with being messed around for the next 18 months is clearly in la la land and needs to be replaced at the earliest possible date. The staff will vote with their feet long before then!

Mr Della Bosca (NSW Health Minister) who announced just one week ago that $100M was to be spent on the eMR must be just furious to be let down so badly.

A very bad career move for the CEO to not make sure the basics of Health IT implementation were followed! (Assuming s/he knew them in the first place - Health IT skills are so undervalued there is no certainty that was the case!)

Jinx even! Just amazing, but sadly typical of what seems to be the norm for NSW Health.

David.