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."

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

I Have Seen Some Poorly Researched Articles On Australian E-Health But This One Takes The Biscuit!

This appeared a little while ago:

New Oz eHealth strategy

Article posted on: October 31, 2016
For around two decades, Australia has been working under various governments and schemes to implement a national eHealth strategy – and finally, on 1 July 2016, the new formed Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) started operating, reports an article in this month’s HIMSS Insights magazine.
The agency, which is pushing for a wider adoption of electronic health records, spearheads the Commonwealth of Australia’s revised approach to eHealth policy. Australia’s current national eHealth strategy dates back to 2008, reports Cornelia Wels-Maug, in the piece. This strategy consists of several elements, including the implementation of an electronic health record (EHR) system, ePrescribing and dispensing of medication, telehealth programmes for people in remote areas and a national healthcare identifier service that enables healthcare stakeholders to exchange medical information on a specific person. However, the execution of the eHealth strategy across the six states and two territories that constitute Australia has been patchy and, unsurprisingly, each state and territory has meanwhile come up with its own eHealth roadmap. This results in a multitude of individual state and territory systems that operate under different legislation, compliance regimes and do not facilitate a nationwide exchange of information.
Later this year, a new eHealth strategy, the so-called ‘National Digital Health Strategy 2016-19’ will be released. However, details on its content will depend on the incoming government that was elected in July, reports Wels-Maug, although it is widely believed that any government will push an increased use of digital solutions in the healthcare field.
You can read the full story here - Revamping eHealth Down Under
Here is the link:
Given the consultation on the new “National Digital Health Strategy 2016-19” does not end until late January 2017 this has the feel of being a little disconnected from reality.
From the announcement:
“Individuals and groups can attend the face-to-face events, or participate online via the survey at website: conversation.digitalhealth.gov.au.
The survey is open from Thursday 3 November 2016 until Tuesday 31 January 2017 at 5pm AEDST.”
See here:
As for thinking anyone has taken any notice of the 2008 National E-Health Strategy, which was agreed but never had a dollar allocated, in the last five years they are dreaming. It is a sad lonely .pdf and has been so for many years.
Reading the full downloadable story just compounds the errors made. What a farce!
David.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sign of the times I am afraid. The ADHA is being flooded with the 'stakeholder' chattering class who might sound qualified casting opinions from a safe distance but I am not convinced they have a broad enough understanding or experience at a national level, cheap statements and boilerplate thinking is not scalable.

A previous post in the week I thought summed things up well

The public will (are starting to)be bombarded by messages and ‘consultations’ pushing the ‘transformational’ changes taking place and inviting them to be part of a ‘participatory revolution’. I am already witnessing well-meaning people being led to believe that their contribution might have some influence. Indeed it may well be worth going to some of their events, at least to try to understand – and query – how they are using these buzzwords.

This dishonest vocabulary aims to fool the public including well intended champions of eHealth and better health and well being causes, into supporting a host of dubious changes. It relies on a counterpoint image of a desperately archaic Health system, crumbling in an inevitable apocalypse of overweight ageing, diabetic bed blockers who really should know better and die in their own beds – “Care Home”.

Perhaps We should run a talley on these spin words.

Anonymous said...

The ADHA is a perfect example of the swamp that Trump wants to drain. How are we going to drain the ADHA swamp??? Its going nowhere and its more of the same.

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

I track the statistics Health puts up here:
https://myhealthrecord.gov.au/internet/mhr/publishing.nsf/Content/news-002

In the report for the week up to 6 November, the total number of registrations for My Health Record increased by 2,881/day. This is a drop from the previous weeks of 3,515/day (23-Oct) & 3,326/day (30-Oct). This number (2,881) is the lowest it's been since I started collecting - 26 June.

If we say that the registration rate is about 3,000/day and take the increase in population to be estimated at 850/day (based upon numbers from http://abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/F41B99AB234B2074CA25792F00161838?Opendocument )

then (excluding new-borns who appear to be registered as a matter of course) the number of people registering for a MyHR is probably in the order of 2,750/day.

The answer to the question "How are we going to drain the ADHA swamp???" might be - just wait.


Anonymous said...

As members of civil scociety we have a chance to voice our opinions, go forth attend the public consultations, make it clear in the surveys the retrieving a patients information and viewing that information can be achieved just as well without a central PDF library. There is a good number of readers and voters on this site and we live in an age of quantity not quality.

Anonymous said...

ADHA is the perfect example of a swamp, well yes and no, I would say ADHA is more like pond life within the swamp, the department(s) would be the swamp, as with any life its ability to evolve is constrained by the environment it lives in. The swamp has not changed and the predators are the same. What I believe is happening in the swamp is a battle of the brood parasites, the department won't want to loose it's ugly duckling and settle for only policy and the cuckoos in ADHA would appear to want Policy setting as their remit in order to reengineer the health system.

I don't think Canberra quite knows what it has spawned in Tim and Co