Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Friday, March 23, 2012

The Peak IT Industry Lobby Reveals It Is Not Really In Touch With The Grassroots of E-Health. Pretty Sad.

This little pearler turned up here today.

ICT industry plays key role delivering electronic health records

The Australian Information Industry Association says that the key role played by the organisation’s members in bringing secure, accessible and affordable health care to all Australians through secure Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) is now more clearly understood with the release of a major government report into electronic health records, tabled by the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee.
The AIIA’s CEO, Suzanne Campbell, has welcomed the committee's report, saying that it was major step towards full implementation of PCEHR. "Shared electronic health records will greatly facilitate access to health care across Australia, and ensure that no matter where you are health professionals will have access to your full medical history," Campbell says.
"In many cases this will quite literally be a life saver as critical time in emergency situations will be saved with the medical records being instantly accessible.
According to Campbell, the inquiry found the current paper-based health-care system is fragmented, resulting in mistakes and duplication, and she says that some witnesses had raised concerns about “lack of transparency” in the proposed PCEHR governance system, as well as “poor functionality of PCEHRs which might compromise a successful rollout.” The inquiry noted however, that clinical and patient safety issues raised by some were due to a level of confusion among those stakeholders.
Lots more here:
This really is an astonishing set of comments. To date precisely nothing has been delivered and for some reason that the AIIA seems unable to grasp there are even some who are a little sceptical about the correctness of what is being done - including the Federal Opposition, The AMA and the MSIA. I don’t think for a moment these entities are ‘confused’.
The comments reported a really just a rather biased spruiking of the Government line. This is made even more odd by the fact that the information circulated to members was much more balanced and made it clear there were some ongoing concerns regarding the PCEHR project.
I wonder why there is no mention of the Opposition view on the project?
If and when the wheels come off - and that is by no means unlikely - the AIIA CEO might have wished she was a little more balanced in what she had reported as her views. Maybe getting more than a paediatric understanding of the complexities of e-Health could be a good plan going forward. What DoHA and NEHTA are doing does not, in any way, have consensus industry support - despite her claims.
Just representing the big end of town in IT, without really coming to grips with the risks and the nature of E-Health, is not smart in my view. As those of us a little closer to e-health know NEHTA and the PCEHR program has brought a diverse mix of good and bad to those at the coal face - some of whom for no good reason have been actively excluded from involvement to their distinct commercial disadvantage. Sadly their voices are too small to be heard but they are, funnily enough, those with much of Australia’s expertise in e-Health.
Coming out with unalloyed and uncritical enthusiasm suggests there other agendas at work. I wonder what they are?
David.

8 comments:

Patto said...

I don't think it's like they have some sort of secret agenda.

$400 million+ projects are good for the IT industry - in that it is money going into the pockets of companies who are members of AIIA.

Now it may not be good for the small e-health vendors, the e-health market, the patients, the doctors or the nation - but they aren't really part of the AIIA constituency.

And I'm actually not being facetious. Why would you expect a lobbying organisation not to be all thumbs up for free government money for some of its members?

(disclaimer: my (small) company is a member of AIIA and MSIA)

Dr David G More MB PhD said...

That is why I called them. Hardly operating in the public interest.

David.

Patto said...

But hardly a surprise..

Anonymous said...

The Big end of town is not the Big end of town by accident.

They are pretty disciplined about not "biting the hand that feeds you".

And while bureaucrats control Australia's eHealth funding millions without any accountability or attempt to achieve real meaningful use on behalf of their Tax Payer "masters", the Big End of Town will continue to play yes sir, no sir, $30million bags full sir!

Does that answer your question David??

Anonymous said...

This fact has become quite clear to me over the years. The big end of town are often clueless and innovation is not something they do. Massaging the egos of narcacistic managers and public servants is something they are very good at. In fact they are co-dependant.

The only policy that would work, and is cheap is adopting the role of a regulator and saying that is an Australian Standard exists you will comply with it or not use it at all. This would make a huge difference and also motivate smaller vendors to engage in creating useful standards.

That is the policy that the current opposition should adopt. They would probably need to supply more funding to providers to pay for software that had software engineering as part of its genesis, but that should be done by increasing rebates and letting the user decide on which compliant software they bought.

Anonymous said...

Someone has finally acted on Con Ops recommendations!

E-health records sign onto australia.gov.au
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/294593,e-health-records-sign-onto-australiagovau.aspx

It's far easier to secure a single entry portal than multiple entry portals.

Multiple portals, as proposed in the original draft Concept of Operations for the PCEHR, would have opened the door to the multitudes who seek to influence/gain from portal traffic (conflicts of interest) - doctors, patients, etc, and would have been far more difficult and costly to secure.

Let's hope there's more good news ahead.

Eric Browne said...

Anonymous of 3/24/2012 01:20:00 PM said:-
"It's far easier to secure a single entry portal than multiple entry portals."
That might be the good news, but the bad news is it creates a single point of failure + a reliance on poorly implemented infrastructure linking to poorly implemented infrastructure. It's not very helpful to get messages like:
"Access unavailable
Access to your agency account is not available from this australia.gov.au account.
To access your agency account from your australia.gov.au account in the future, you may need to try to link your accounts again.
You may need to remove any existing link to your agency account first. " OR :-

"Service Unavailable
A system error has occurred and you have been logged off.
Please try again later.
If the error continues please contact us."

Dr David G More MB PhD said...

Eric,

Love the error messages:

This was a ripper I got yesterday.

FAILURE: INVALID_SESSION_ID: Invalid Session ID found in SessionHeader: Illegal Session. Session not found, missing session key: 00D20000000JRaL!AQYAQAqNGKjIihlghoETvReQaJHqhIaq97sXlwAlcY0NOY9BSBhHLSHn1fBYdJ_dE8Wvd_GSPZCHKFe1sF2Voc7pHBQJZJaF

Cheers

David.