The following popped up today.
Thursday, 18 August 2011
Roxon’s health records system a ‘massive waste of $467 million’
by Andrew Crook
The headline announcement this week that health minister Nicola Roxon had hatched a $77 million deal with global services behemoth Accenture to deliver its controversial e-health records system has failed to quell the rage of vocal detractors who say taxpayers are being taken for a ride.
The chosen consortium, also including Oracle, Orion Health and a suite of smaller IT minnows, is charged with rolling out the $467 million “personally controlled electronic healthcare record system”, or PCEHR. It will allow patients to register for an e-health record that could be accessed by GPs and specialists around the country. The winning trio triumphed in the Singapore government’s bid to deliver a similar system last year.
Roxon has unsurprisingly championed the project, due to go live next July, with a spokesperson telling Crikey this morning that it represents “good value for money and will pay dividends for Australian patients for many years to come”. But a range of critics, led by the Australian Privacy Foundation and the Australian Medical Association, continue to arc up.
Prominent e-health dissenter Dr David More, a former acting-chief information officer in NSW (Health), questioned the raison d’etre of the entire initiative.
“You’ve got to step back and ask yourself is this a sensible thing to be doing and is this the right approach? Only then can you begin to start measuring whether it’s value for money … this is one of these utterly crap projects that is ill-considered, it’s not being managed well and it’s going to fall over big time. It’s a massive waste of $467 million.”
Dr More said that government has conceived the project simply to “tick the box” on e-health without looking at what the project’s broader aims and goals were meant to be.
“There’s one huge question you have to ask. Who is this EHR for? Is it for doctors to communicate with other doctors and share patients’ information so that the quality of care improves or is it for patients to record what they think? The two things are not the same system.”
There is lots of other dissenters gathered here as well! See
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/08/18/roxons-health-records-system-a-massive-waste-of-467-million/
It will be fun to see what comments get posted!
Enjoy!
David.
Do they have any current figures to estimate the current failures and room for improvements ? If you can't measure it now it will make it hard to quantify any improvements. You need this before making a value judgement as to the effectiveness of any change. There will be several so called benefits that may never be measurable so cannot be proved to be a benefit. As usual, lot's of promises and no guarantee.
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