A kind and diligent observer of all things PCEHR sent me this a day or so ago as a summary of Departmental comments.
2 Dec. 2010: NEHTA is now "Managing Agent" for DoHA's program
The change in NEHTA's governance became very obvious after Dec. 2010.
7 April 2011: PCEHR is for Chronic Disease and Aged Care
The scope of the PCEHR is wound back to small segments of the population!
23 June 2011: Actual PCEHR deliverables for 1 July 2012
(Deputy Secretary Rosemary Huxtable)
The PCEHR deliverables are severely wound back to "citizens can register for the PCEHR" ...
On 1 July 2012, DoHA delivers exactly what RH outlines (on slide 15) one year before!
26 March 2012: No "Big Bang" with the PCEHR
The go-live scope of the PCEHR is further wound back to a "soft opening"... which is exactly what happened in July 2012.
20 March 2013: So what about the Future of the PCEHR?
Halton's speech says exactly nothing about the future of the PCEHR, apart from obvious operational growth...
-----
On a review of this collection of public utterances from DoHA it is hard to disagree that the specific future plans have become pretty vague and diffuse - with a very interesting twist that what became obvious about 6 months ago and is now being made apparent. This is a ‘big data’ system for the Government to mine for their own purposes - not a clinically focussed system.
This is confirmed in the latest speech where there is a clear sense in the first 15 minutes that all the PCEHR is planned to be is a great big feed for the analytics efforts of the Department to manage the health system rather than actually trying to provide clinical benefit.
There is also a sense that we are going to see a multiple set of repositories separate to the NEHRS / PCEHR. The first would seem to be the National Prescribing and Dispensing Repository.
The implications of this are really quite interesting. Is it covered by the PCEHR Legislation and protections? What consent is required for these pharmacy records to be uploaded and so on?
The last 10-12 minutes were on Telehealth and were said to be an integral part of the National E-Health Strategy. While it is mentioned I think this is just a distraction from the failing part of what is going on which was not in the National Strategy at all!
All the speeches are useful but this last one lays bare the why DoHA is doing this. It is to create data for them to mine. Had it been designed to clinical care we would have seen something quite different.
David.
0 comments:
Post a Comment