The following appeared a few days ago
NSW Heath appoints CIO for e-health, IT strategies
Department aiming for health IT leadership
- Rodney Gedda (CIO)
- 16 February, 2011 09:54
The NSW Department of Health has appointed Ian Rodgers as director of its new e-health and ICT strategy branch.
Rodgers has CIO-level experience in IT strategy and governance across the public and private sectors. He will start in the new role on March 30.
The new position has been advertised since November last year.
Since October 2008, Rodgers worked as an executive program director for a significant Victorian government IT project involving the replacement of IT systems and associated business transformation.
One outcome was to deliver a “best practice registration and licensing service across a number of large government agencies for a broad range of licences and registration functions”, according to NSW Health.
The agencies involved included VicRoads, Victoria Police, Victorian Taxi Directorate, Marine Safety Victoria, and the State Revenue Office.
Prior to this role, Rodgers was CIO at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne from 2004 to 2008 and CIO, general manager of network operations and COO at Primus Telecommunications from 1998 to 2004.
Rodgers spent 20 years with the Australian Defence Force (Army) and six years as general manager of IT with Tenix and Transfield before joining Primus.
According to NSW Health, Rodgers is “very much looking forward” to returning to health and he will play a key role in strengthening the department’s “e-health and ICT strategy and governance to position NSW Health at the forefront of health IT in Australia”.
In 2009 the NSW government committed $100 million over two years to the development of an e-health system to replace paper-based health records.
The NSW Healthelink project, which began about seven years ago was well received by clinicians.
More here:
In case you are wondering I reckon the worst job is to be the CIO of DoHA, mainly because of the inevitable political interference and deadlines that will have be to handled.
The other aspect, of course, of that job would be handling that rogue company that seems to think it knows all about e-Health Strategy and Approaches in the absence of a clear governance framework as to just who is responsible for what an accountable to whom!
NSW Health also, of course has a few challenges. Among them are probably how to gracefully close down Healthelink without anyone noticing as well as to actually get round to organising a clear-eyed assessment as to how e-Health has travelled in the last decade and what lessons have been learnt.
It seems to me astonishing that the implementations of all those systems in all those public hospitals have not been the subject of a public review.
Of course the other major challenge will be to start work just 4 days after the NSW Election when there will certainly be a new Health Minister.
She (Ms Skinner) will certainly be wanting to clean house and sweep away all the rubbish so she can start with as cleaner slate as possible. If I was in NSW in Health IT I would be looking forward to some very ‘interesting times’!
David.
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