Crikey Alerts Us To a US Blog Covering an E-Health Fiasco in Australia!

While taking my usual fix from Crikey.com.au I came across the following article.

3. Botched software upgrade produces mass X-ray failure

Crikey intern Nicole Eckersley writes:

HEALTH, IT, RADIOLOGY

A botched $8.4 million software upgrade in Western Australia public hospitals has left radiology departments in chaos, delivering false patient X-ray results and constant crashes.

Radiologist and imaging software blogger Doctor Dalai reported on the saga last Thursday, after a barrage of complaints from radiologists in WA. A source inside WA Health confirmed to Crikey a "dramatic impairment" in hospital procedure.

Dalai reported a litany of problems with the PACS software: unacceptable system down time, images that don’t match patient names and/or records, left-right reversed mammograms and non-chronological previous case lists, and processing slowdowns so severe that a Code Yellow -- signifying a failure of essential services -- was declared across all WA hospitals, including a hold on all new admissions and elective surgeries.

The WA Health source said the system failures impacted radiology departments across all public hospitals.

"Efficiency has been dramatically reduced, with departments now unable to cope with their daily workloads, and patient exposed to significant risk due to missed or delayed diagnosis," they report.

Lots more is available to Crikey subscribers at www.crikey.com.au.

I decided to track down the source blog and see what was happening.

Go here to read the blog post.

http://doctordalai.blogspot.com/2010/05/blunder-down-under.html

No point in really commenting. Dalai’s blog says it all. Sounds like a bit of a mess over in the West to me!

Sounds like another one of those centralised, foisted on the clinicians solutions gone ‘pear shaped’. When will they ever learn?

David.