Just a short entry to wish all the readers of this blog compliments of the season and all the very best for 2007. I hope we can see some real progress next year!
I plan a week off to consider some of the more complex issues and also to review some papers for Medinfo 2007.
Early next year I plan articles covering
• Personal Health Records
• The Opportunity Costs of not Implementing E-Health
• Shared Electronic Health Records – How can They Be Made to Work?
• NEHTA's Pre Christmas Document Releases – Do they Add Anything Useful?
• The IHI And the Access Card – What Total Policy Overlap and Stupidity.
See you in 2007!
David.
Scott Adams' Xmas message, at Comic for 25 Dec 2006.
ReplyDeleteIf there is an argument for public hospitals to lead in Health IT, then perhaps the public needs to engage with the business of the hospitals. Would it be possible to get up a small campaign to encourage hospitals to respond to general questions about IT?
A model based on Australian Shareholders Association could work.
In Gambling with science policy, Julian Cribb wrote about the deadening effect of the doctrine of commercialise-or-die for Science in Australia:
ReplyDeleteIn a sense all science funding is a gamble. But surely the bet has a fairer chance of repaying the investment if the resulting knowledge is freely available to thousands of enterprises and individuals, than if a handful have exclusive access? The Commission, in effect, has said: if companies want to gamble on science let them do so at their own expense. Why should the taxpayer finance their punt via the Australian Research Council, CSIRO or the Cooperative Research Centres? Why should science policy be used to remedy a defect of industry policy - the lack of commercialisation?
Same goes for the IT sector, too. An overarching Health IT structure, like the US government's VistA, is never going to be a commercial product, just part of the national infrastructure.