In October last year I wrote - regarding implementation of the HI Service:
“The alleged comment made by a senior NEHTA official that “implementation is not NEHTA’s problem, and that they are there to design perfection’ sure rings true!
Watch this unravel - from their timelines it already seems to be behind. Without a properly resourced and led implementation, backed by appropriate incentives and undertaken with a solid well considered sector wide implementation plan (developed by project managers who know what they are doing) this is a dead duck!”
The full blog is here:
http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2010/10/we-can-all-watch-in-bemused-amazement.html
Well late yesterday we had this little gem appear.
Slow start to healthcare identifier service
- Karen Dearne
- From: Australian IT
- April 13, 2011
FEWER than 30,000 people have checked their healthcare identity number since it was issued to all Medicare users on July 1 last year.
The government has automatically allocated identifiers to 23 million people.
It is intended that all healthcare providers apply the number to any medical record associated with an individual.
None of the 400,000 health professionals with provider credentials have accessed the Health Identifiers service as yet, and only 10 of around 80,000 eligible healthcare organisations have registered with the operator, Medicare.
The $90 million service -- intended to reduce medical errors and improve information-sharing by allocating a unique 16-digit identifier to every Australian -- was launched by the Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, but is still not operational due to concerns over the system's safety and licensing arrangements.
In February, the Health Department banned its use in any live IT environment, until outstanding concerns were resolved. These included the need for greater pre-production and software conformance testing to ensure identifiers could be used safely within healthcare providers' systems, and reduce the potential for misidentification of patients or mismatching medical records.
Now, Medicare documents have revealed only 28,456 people have looked up their HI number while visiting their Medicare Online accounts.
Medicare fielded a further 636 enquiries from customers -- 401 via a dedicated phone hotline, 76 in an office setting and 159 by email, fax or post.
Two people queried the date of the creation of the record, and one complained about being assigned an identifier.
More here:
All one can say is that my suggestions have been ignored and the progress has been, as expected, just glacial.
It certainly seems that delivery of ‘perfection’ is a remarkably slow process.
One can on guess how long we will have to wait for the PCEHR implementation.
We are forcefully reminded just how meaningless political deadlines are and how they tend to be totally disconnected from reality. If BHP ran its activities the way this lot do they would go out backwards and quickly but I guess when you are Government delivery is a lesser priority. Politics, not delivery, is what matters.
Just hopeless.
David.
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