Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

This Incompetent Piecemeal Approach Really Annoys Me. Just Hopeless.

The following appeared a few days ago.

DoHA seeks Web portal to combat chronic disease among indigenous Australians

The portal will build upon a pilot portal, built by HP on the Microsoft SharePoint platform
The Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) is on the hunt for a provider to develop and host a Web portal with the aim of better managing and preventing chronic disease among indigenous Australians.
The Indigenous Web Based Primary Health Care Resource (IWBPHCR) will be a Web portal which integrates with clinical systems and enables healthcare staff to access materials relating to the prevention and management of chronic illness among indigenous Australians.
“The IWBPHCR collates and presents in a single resource existing tools, guides and other online information that promotes best practice in the prevention, identification and management of chronic disease in indigenous Australians,” the documents reads. “It covers the key chronic diseases contributing to the burden of disease including cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus type 2, chronic respiratory disease, chronic kidney disease and cancer.”
More here:
It seems to me this is archetypical ‘reverse discrimination’. If there is a business case to create a provider portal for 2.2% of the population (the Indigenous Population according to Wikipedia) then the case for a National Portal for all professional healthcare providers must be utterly overwhelming.
Pure and simple siloed and ignorant policy development and implementation in my view. The same sort of dreadful policy development quality that cuts the incentives for students to study science and maths in the Budget Update. Both are utterly appalling and prejudice our future.
David.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've got a much better idea than a piecemeal approach - let's have a big integrated project that solves everything properly. That's certainly the kind of approach you've enthusiastically endorsed on a regular basis here ;-)

Anonymous said...

UK appears to now be progressing a more patient-centred approach to improving health outcomes, yet no indication patients will be given the capacity to self-report health outcomes.

Cris Kerr

.....

Newly available Health Data will support Medical Research and Patient Empowerment

November 29, 2011

The release of important health data will stimulate medical research and enable patients to take informed decisions about their care, the Department of Health has said today.

As outlined in the Chancellor’s Growth Review, new world-first data services will help to drive improvements in care. The UK is uniquely placed as being one of the few countries to have a universal ‘cradle to grave’ health system boasting some of the most detailed, anonymised information on patients. The UK has the potential to lead the world as a location for data-enabled health research, with direct benefit to patients, via the Clinical Practice Research Datalink.

For the first time services provided by the NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care will link datasets from GP and hospital care, providing health service, pharmaceutical industry, academics and other professionals with unequalled levels of information about the journeys of patients through the care system and the outcomes of different treatments.

Alongside this boost to medical research, patients will be able to see new data on GP performance on NHS Choices website this December, helping them make informed choices about their healthcare. Further data on GP prescribing will be published which information providers can use to inform patients, supporting them as they make decisions about their own care.

Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, said:

“Patients will benefit directly from our efforts to make health data transparent and easy to use by the medical research community. This will fuel advances in treatment, as well as positioning this country as a centre of excellence for research. We will also encourage information providers to use this data we open up to the public, so they can offer patients insights into the quality of care on offer and drive improvements in the quality of science. Not only will this approach to open data support research and knowledge-based services, it will crucially empower patients to take decisions about their own care and so drive up quality.”

http://mediacentre.dh.gov.uk/2011/11/29/newly-available-health-data-will-support-medical-research-and-patient-empowerment/

Anonymous said...

It's about as clueless as the other eHealth programs they have fed billions into with no return.

They just don't understand that we need reliable building blocks like low level compliance with standards to enable fluid transfer of information in a reliable manner. Does anyone in the department have a clue about software? I am sure they don't as the mistakes they make are all very old well described ones.

They keep trying to build on swamp because foundations are not sexy.

Brett Esler said...

The pilot of this project contains an implementation of HL7 Infobutton standardised context specific query. This takes the basic context of interest demographic, diagnosis with clinical terminology (SNOMED-CT) to form a structured query and obtain structured response. The content of the web resource is specific - the approach is not. This methodology is applied also in the context of general population resources RACGP Preventative Care Guidelines (eRedBook) and Therapeautic Guidelines (ETG). This method allows integrated GP clinical systems to initiate web resource query based on the currently opened patient record.
Absolutely agree money would be better spent on the underlying clinical system information standardisation - we have built our capability over at least a half dozen pilots funded by DOHA and numerous other peak bodies (especially RACGP) in the past none of these have had direct requirement of health information system standardisation outcomes. Health information outcomes for any funded work are absolutely relevant to long term success and improvement; clear specification of these required outcomes in tenders is essential.