What An Interesting Set Of Comments On E-Health From A Relative Outsider.

This appeared a few weeks ago:

Productivity: creating a government of 'doers' not 'gunnas'

Thu, 06/06/2013 - Peter Fritz

Too much time is spent on discussing, researching and strategising projects and not enough emphasis is placed on implementation. Peter Fritz explains how it’s time to incentivise project completion.

Decide faster, implement faster, monitor better, develop the right incentives to drive the process, that’s what’s needed to ensure Australia is productive.

Productivity is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input".

…..

Besides the obvious silos that are called departments, such as those of Finance, Innovation, Environment, Health and so on, our organisations are further divided into sections and units, few of which are co-ordinated for the single purpose.

An example of how this plays out is the introduction of electronic health records. First committed to in 1991, today after spending several billion dollars, Australia still does not have a fully functioning online health records system. Only 109,000 people have registered out of a target of 500,000 by June 2013. It should not have taken 22 years to get the project off the ground. This is just one of the many examples where our lack of productivity is failing us. It is not the billions of dollars spent that are the largest cost to the country and the community, but the opportunity costs a whole generation has missed out on.

…..

Peter Fritz AM is Managing Director of Global Access Partners, and Group Managing Director of TCG - a diverse group of companies which over the last 40 years has produced many breakthrough discoveries in computer and communication technologies. He chairs a number of influential government and private enterprise boards and is active in the international arena, including having represented Australia on the OECD Small and Medium Size Enterprise Committee.

The full blog is found here:

http://www.openforum.com.au/content/productivity-creating-government-%25E2%2580%259Cdoers%25E2%2580%259D-not-%25E2%2580%259Cgunnas%25E2%2580%259D

The comments in italics are really quite interesting. What we are  given is a very strong reminder of the incredible ‘opportunity cost’ of all the messing about we have seen from Government in the e-Health domain. Frankly it is disaster and has surely killed people.

David.