The following popped up a little while ago.
Nine organisations have been selected to develop a Project Implementation Plan to run a second-wave site:
- Medibank Private Limited Project will implement a consumer-oriented portal, which integrates consumer entered information into a ‘Health Book’. The ‘Health Book’ will be initially made available to all Medibank Private customers and their healthcare providers enrolled in Medibank’s Health Management and Chronic Disease Management programs. Medibank Private will not be using any of this information for the management of claims or eligibility for health care insurance benefits.
- Brisbane South Division Limited Project will deliver a substantial eHealth site in one of Australia’s major capital cities. The project will aim at enrolling up to 25,000 individuals in the Brisbane and Ipswich region. A key focus will be on individuals with disabilities and their carers, war veterans and war widows, and children commencing school. The project will bring two Division’s of General Practice onboard, Brisbane South and Ipswich and West Moreton, and public and private hospitals, allied health and GP’s. The project will leverage wave 1 infrastructure.
- Mater Misericordiae Health Project will deliver an eHealth site to enhance healthcare for mothers and newborns. The population reach of the project is 9000 mothers and involves three GP Divisions (South East Alliance, Brisbane South and the South East Primary HealthCare network), local specialist obstetricians and a software vendor InterSystems. The project will leverage wave 1 infrastructure.
- Northern Territory Department of Health and Families Project will deliver a lead eHealth site for Indigenous Australians living in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. The project will leverage the existing NT shared electronic health record and extend the existing service to all Northern Territory residents and Indigenous individuals in Western Australia and South Australia.
- Greater Western Sydney eHealth Consortium (NSW Department of Health) Project will implement key building blocks for state-wide eHealth infrastructure that will allow NSW Health to connect to the PCEHR System when it becomes available. The initial focus will be on priority consumer groups in the Greater Western Sydney region. The project includes four GP Divisions (WentWest, Nepean, Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury-Hills) and will leverage previous technology investments. With a population reach of 1,750,000, the project will be able to expand the entire solution quickly to encompass a significant geographic area and ultimately the whole of NSW.
- Cradle Coast, North-West Area Health Service Project will provide end of life policy lessons for the PCEHR System. The project targets aged and palliative care patients and their families, palliative care medical specialists and clinical nurse consultants. The project will use off-the-shelf care planning software to share the advance care directives until the national PCEHR infrastructure is in place.
- St Vincent’s and Mater Health Sydney Project will establish a lead eHealth site based around St Vincent’s and Mater Health Sydney, in conjunction with partnering Divisions of General Practice, participating specialists and software vendors including Smart Health, Precedence, HCN and Best Practice. The project has a population reach of 1 million individuals attending the St Vincent’s campus and aims to improve clinical communication across the project’s footprint through the delivery of key PCEHR components.\
- FRED IT Group MedView Project will demonstrate the ability for up to 2 million individuals and their healthcare providers to access their prescribing and dispensing history via a medicines repository using national electronic prescription and other standards. The project will deploy MedView to all pharmacies and GPs in the Geelong region and to a further 10% of this target market nationally. The project will bring together a grouping of private sector eHealth vendors including FRED, eRx, Best Practice, Zedmed, iCare, Microsoft and SIMPL.
- Calvary Healthcare Project will support a cross-border population of approximately 800,000 individuals in the ACT and regional NSW by bringing together a major grouping of private sector eHealth vendors. The vendors involved include iSoft, HCN, HealthLink, Smart Health Solutions and Precedence HealthCare.
The second-wave sites will develop their plans by the end of May 2011 to ensure their work programs meet national objectives.
The eHealth sites program is being managed overall by NEHTA, under contract to the federal Department of Health and Ageing.
The full page is here:
http://www.yourhealth.gov.au/internet/yourhealth/publishing.nsf/Content/eHealth-sites-factsheet
Comments welcome!
David.
Underwhelming in the extreme - the idea that the NT is going to provide a shared record for indigenous australians in WA or SA is a pure fantasy - WA was carefully excluded from any lead site implementation - I wonder why?
ReplyDeleteHalf and billion dollars directed by hollow men and involving state Health departments with and election in 2 years.
ReplyDeleteThe scene is set for some accountability. The challenge is to peer behind the inevitable smoke and mirrors that will be placed before our eyes to hide the real story.
It seems that there are few solid objectives so far, so we need some pressure to declare some, or the projects will be judged a success on trumped up objects later.
Typical of the Labor government to be feathering the nests of their loyal promoters. It is a house of cards.
ReplyDeleteThis announcement just reinforces that
ReplyDeletedecisions in e-Health are purely political and have nothing to do with objective merit that may in fact lead to improved quality and safety in the delivery of health to the Australian public.
Sadly this applies to many aspects of services that are within the clutch of the politicians. Imagine ho good health & education delivery could be if political 'oversight' was removed.
The usual list of cronies seem to have received funding this time.
ReplyDeleteI was told by somebody at NEHTA that the projects announced today had been decided well before the RFT process even kicked off.
It seems they've just wasted everybody's time and resources pursuing a faite accompli. Perhaps they should have done away with the whole RFT sham and awarded it behind closed doors like Wave 1...
Winners are grinners :)
ReplyDeleteTrouble is, 99.9% of the population will be in the loser camp....
ReplyDeleteThis is like the NSW labor party romping it in at the election 4 years ago.... even they say they won one 2 many elections.
I think the definition of Winner is fairly suspect in this case - working with NEHTA and having them "manage" the project will be a nightmare - I think it just reflects how desperate and unsustainable the medical software industry is when there is so much of a feeding frenzy over what is at the end of the day an unattractive proposition from a business perspective and having the bar set so low from a technical and clinical perspective - the people that believe that this is going to help Australians are probably the same people that believed that building a classroom for a school constituted an education revolution
ReplyDeleteDavid, I haven't posted before because I thought you might be a little "over the top" and/or politically motivated, but I now think that you have been right all along. Having finally seen "the plan", I have to agree that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum and Nehta/DoHA's plan is completely insane.
ReplyDeleteIt's taken me a while to get my head around it all, and unfortunately I assumed for a long while that there were adults in charge. I was wrong and I agree that this is going to be yet another monumental waste of money without achieving anything of value.
Software Vendor
"I have to agree that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum"
ReplyDeleteI find it really sad to have worked in the health sector for over 30 years and watched the revolutionary changes that IT has made in most other industries and yet to still have to deal with volumes of paper based patient records and 'lunatics' making decisions!
Watch this money evaporate without any real public benefit.
ReplyDeleteAlready one of the second wave sites that has been announced is saying they will need to descope their project in order to deliver "anything" in the time frame that has been dictated. The whole frenzied approach to it is absolutely staggering. We are talking about nearly $500M here. They have absolutely wasted everybody's time by sucking us into this.
Pink Batts and BER all over again. Can't wait for the Inquiry.
Roxon has put her neck on the chopping block and the clock is ticking.
Hi Anon of 11:43 am.
ReplyDeleteWhich site is that and where is the release if possible?
David.
If I bill a patient for a service worth $100 I am accountable for the quality and validity of that service.
ReplyDeleteI would like to see some aims stated so we can account for the $500M spend here. To not have some accountability for this much money should be a national outrage. I don't know anyone who thinks this is in any may sensible, but as a taxpayer I demand some accountability!! I could be wrong I guess, but how will success be measured if there are no stated aims?? If there are no stated aims why are we spending this huge sum of money in an aimless way?
Reported in the Australian today:
ReplyDelete"Software vendors and project partners were surprised to learn each of the nine projects announced by Health Minister Nicola Roxon last week will be given $100,000 -- and a week to prepare more detailed presentations for approval.
The Australian understands the winning bidders were told that any presentations not considered up to scratch could lead to the project being dropped and another shortlisted candidate brought in."
Great! How would feel being rung to bring in you wares! This is called moving the goal posts as the actual criteria were that there were be a 6 week period to develop a project plan!
The ultimate poison chalice perhaps?
ReplyDeleteBut in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.
I think the current government has a cupboard full of these, drinks anyone?
A classic repeat of the last decade of incompetence starting up all over again for another 10 year walkabout into the never never. Of course the bcats wouldn't know that because they are all new on the block - all they know is that what went before didn't work so forget it and start again. So they are doing just that and the saddest part of all is that they think they are doing a great job leading us all into the future. They will never ever learn.
ReplyDeleteThere simply has to be a better way to build and deploy a working, reliable, secure and fast ehealth infrastructure for this highly complex sector.