Things are Changing at NEHTA – What a Good Thing!

Dr Ian Reinecke – former CEO on of NEHTA - fell on his sword on March 30, 2008.

See:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2008/03/dr-ian-reinecke-resigns-oh-happy-day.html

In the week following we had a pathetic sycophantic press release extolling the ‘Great Leader’s’ virtues.

See:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2008/04/nehta-fantasises-about-contribution-of.html

Dr Reinecke was replaced by Andrew Howard as acting CEO at the same time and Dr Reinecke left.

I published some commentary on the urgent need to change some three weeks later on April 21, 2008

See:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2008/04/nehta-has-not-changed-yet-and-it-does.html

In the last week or two it has started to become increasing clear I might have been just a trifle impatient in pushing quite so hard.

Since that blog was published:

1. The sycophantic press releases have been removed from the NEHTA News Page.

See:

http://www.nehta.gov.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=1&Itemid=144

2. The description of what NEHTA is focussed on found at the Open Health Tools site is a much more health sector orientated description of NEHTA’s role than older ones (e.g. on NEHTA front page)

See:

http://www.openhealthtools.org/Members/Nehta.html

“The National E-Health Transition Authority Limited is a not-for-profit company established by the Australian Commonwealth, State and Territory governments to develop better ways of electronically collecting and securely exchanging health information, to:

• Improve the quality of healthcare services, allowing clinicians to more easily access accurate and complete information about their patients
• Streamline the care of people with long term illness, who need to be looked after by many different health professionals, by enabling seamless handovers of care through for example electronic referrals and discharge summaries.
• Improve clinical and administrative efficiency, by standardising certain types of healthcare information to be recorded in electronic systems; uniquely identifying patients, healthcare providers and medical products; and reforming the purchasing process for medical products.

while maintaining high standards of patient privacy and information security.”

3. From the disappearance of the leadership team listings from the web site, (if not the site map) it seems clear some significant senior changes are being considered.

4. All reports I am getting are of a new openness, flexibility and preparedness to discuss how best to address the various pressing issues NEHTA and Australian E-Health face.

This is all great goodness!

More good news is that the Australian Health Information Council (AHIC) is hopefully about to be finally terminated. This was a totally useless committee that produced low quality, consultant written documentation and totally failed to speak up about the excesses of NEHTA for the last 2-3 years. Out of touch with the health sector was their calling card.

See:

http://www.misaustralia.com/viewer.aspx?EDP://20080509000020639054&magsection=news-headlines-home&portal=_misnews&section=news&title=Health+technology+awaits+new+prognosis

It is a joke their (now former) chairman thinks they have been useful in the last 12 months and are so worthy of more funds. They have added exactly nothing I can detect and basically made utterly fanciful and inaccurate claims about the state of E-Health in Australia. To suggest all we had to do was take the good bits found here and there and deploy them nationally would solve all the problems was fanciful in the extreme. Commentary on some other odd suggestions is found elsewhere.

See:

http://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2008/03/ahic-future-directions-paper-is.html

I say to the new Government, don’t be silly and throw good money after bad!

If this NEHTA trend continues and AHIC is re-designed and re-focussed after the Nation E-Health Strategy is done I will be close to being out of things to write about!

David.