A Government Mouthpiece

On Monday I was "lucky" enough to listen in on the first two hours of the NEHTA 2006 Vendor Forum. On the whole I felt that NEHTA provided little evidence that they had mastered the complexity of Health IT and, sadly as expected by now, they still did not unveil a coherent e-health strategy that could put their initiatives in a comprehensible format.

The whole day was sprinkled through with flavours of Web Services and its bigger brother Service Orientated Architectures (SOA). While the slides were colourful, what was not made clear is that Web Services and SOA are both still very much works in progress and still having much of their implementation complexity worked out. I think it is rather early in the 'hype cycle' to hitch Australia's e-health future to these, as yet, unproven technological approaches. Time will tell, but another false architectural start - like HealthConnect - would be a very bad thing.

The worst aspect of the day was a speech given by a DoHA representative who should have known better given his background. His argument was based on the premise that because it is not possible to work out how to distribute the benefits from Health IT between governments, consumers and providers each should fund their own infrastructure. This is facile in the extreme. It is well known that the majority of benefits flow to the payers (Government in our case) and consumers and that most of the costs are incurred by the providers. If there is not a policy response to this stark fact nothing will happen - as has largely been the case to-date.

The only reason any competent bureaucrat would assert otherwise has to be because they have been told there will be no money and they need to put the best spin possible on a sad situation.

It will be interesting when the NEHTA Benefits Realisation Project identifies the truth. I wonder where DoHA will hide then?

David