A couple of really quite astonishing articles appeared in The Australian IT Section today.
First we had this:
Health record identifier held up because of safety concerns
- Karen Dearne
- From: The Australian
- February 08, 2011
THE Health Department has banned the use of the $90 million Healthcare Identifier service in any live environment due to concerns over the system's safety.
The service, operated by Medicare, was declared live by Health Minister Nicola Roxon in July, but has been sitting idle while software interface specifications, licensing arrangements and compliance issues are thrashed out.
Last week, the department prohibited use of the service until all concerns were resolved.
Despite the fanfare over meeting Ms Roxon's deadline for the start of the service -- Medicare issued every Australian with a 16-digit unique number on July 1-- fears have grown of the potential for mis-identification of patients and mis-matching of medical records.
Only state health departments have tested the service so far. Broader adoption depends on finalisation of Medicare's Notice of Integration and conformance processes that ensure all software interacts correctly with the service.
A department spokeswoman said pre-production testing of related systems was important for privacy and safety reasons.
"In order to obtain identifiers for use in live systems, the software must first pass two types of testing," she said. "Medicare tests the software to make sure the integrity of the HI service system is not compromised when the (external) software obtains the identifiers.
"In addition, independent accredited testing laboratories will test the software to ensure that identifiers are used safely within the healthcare providers' systems.
More is found here if you can bear it:
And then we have this.
No budget for huge health e-record development task
- Karen Dearne
- From: The Australian
- February 08, 2011
SOFTWARE vendors face 10-15 staff years of development work to meet the complex requirements of the $467 million e-health record program, but there's no plan to pay for it.
Health Communication Network chief executive John Frost said the federal government was spending "obscenely large" sums on the personally controlled e-health record, including $38.5m over the next six months on the National E-Health Transition Authority (Nehta).
"That money, frankly, will be spent on consultants," he said. "The government has allocated $12.5m for the three lead implementation sites, $55m for second-wave sites, and $467m for just the first phase" of the personalised e-health record program.
"But the funding proposed for the people who are really going to make it happen is just laughable."
HCN, which supplies the market-leading GP software Medical Director, is one of five desktop vendors invited to join Nehta's software panel, to help "test and fine-tune" the currently undefined personalised record specifications so they can be used at the three lead sites.
Lots more gruesome details here:
Taking the Health Identifier (HI) Service first, regular readers will know I have been saying for ages there are issues about the data quality of the base HI Service and its fitness for record matching.
See here from back in 2009.
http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2009/07/nehta-tries-to-fudge-it-again-when-are.html
This led me to suggest we need incrementally scaled pilots to prove utility and safety. Now - eight months after the fanfare start - it seems we are not much advanced and even the Department is not sure if what they have is actually viable. Bit late to discover that after 2-3 years of development etc.
The second article just shows how fabulously out of touch Government and NEHTA are about how projects such as this should be planned, managed, funded and delivered.
Taken together these two articles just shout incompetence and stupidity about national program delivery.
Heaven help us! The risk of all this just imploding around us must be amazingly high!
David.
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