Here are the results of the poll.
Do You Believe The PCEHR Will EVER Make A Positive Difference To The Quality, Cost and Safety Of Healthcare In Australia?
Yes 12% (13)No 78% (85)
I Have No Idea 10% (11)
Total votes: 109
An overwhelming majority seem to think the PCEHR will never be a success. I wonder why?
Good to see such a great number of responses!
Again, many, many thanks to all those that voted!
David.
5 comments:
After quite a few years of watching, learning and doing and thinking about it I am sure that the current path can never work. It astounds me that ?smart people in government (rather than public service) can't see the futility of the last 10 years. Mind you its not just Australia, but all over the world that we see the same situation.
In many ways what eHealth delivered in the 1990s is almost the peak and was at the time well ahead of many other industry groups. This was without significant government input. Since then people from the government have come the help and we all know how scary that can be!
Rather than IT spending having to show benefit we have had endless pots of gold on offer if you can convince a public servant that you can help. No experience or proof is required, just a smart suit and good skills at power point and a faith in endless waffle (read process++++). This is something that public servants really love. These pots of gold have caused a type of gold rush with every man and his consulting company wanting to be part of the action. The standards meetings are full of VIPs with buzz words the name of the day and chest puffing that would make chesty bonds look like a wimp. Really the less formal qualifications in computer science the better, but you should have a mba.
We (meaning we as taxpayers) have wasted $2 Billion dollars with virtually no return. Last time i heard it was 500 document views a month and no data good enough to do any decision support. Now Malcolm Turnbull if you are as smart as you think you are you must see that this has a bad smell. Its rotten to the core and those in high places in Woden Valley don't want to tell you that. The expense on deodorant alone must be enormous. To his credit Tony Abbott could smell something rotten, but the labor government failed to put it out of its misery, and just tried double of nothing, a few times in fact. Well I am sad to say its still nothing...
Whatever happened in the 1990s encouraged major advancement, I suspect it was just that private money only supported things that worked and we had a proper standards process attended by real IT nerds who actually knew something. The public service know nothing and you Malcolm Turnbull should smell the stench. Its time to look past the "advice" and break out of the world of Sir Humphrey. This rot needs to stop.
Adding to the criticism....
Putting aside technology devices used to measure and monitor an individual's health status, there are two major assumptions that have led governments up the garden path, aided by consulting companies who are consulting in a fledgling discipline - that should have been a warning in itself.
1. they think eHealth is all about building IT systems
2. they think eHealth is about patient records.
neither is true. eHealth is much more about making better health care decisions for which you need access to far more information than just patient data.
The current situation is this:
The PCEHR is a very poor implementation of a health record system. There are too many open issues around information quality, access and management. It is not clear what it is for, who is to use it and how they will use it to improve health decision making, especially when most health professionals already have at least some form of electronic record keeping system.
The PCEHR, even if it were perfect, would not be sufficient to enable better health decision making.
ACeH has three possible options.
1. Just see themselves as custodians of a flawed technology system which will slowly and expensively die.
2. Tinker around the edges and fool themselves into believing they are making real progress by developing some sort of enabling infrastructure.
3. Take a long hard look at what has happened so far; listen to the dissenting voices and cogitate on why they are dissenting; and expand their horizons to encompass the full potential of modern information system technologies as applied to the whole health care industry.
Or to put it another way, they can show leadership or they can stick their heads in the sand. The trouble with the latter approach is that the tide will come in whether they like it or not.
Malcolm Turnbull will never see this comment and many other balanced, mature, intelligent comments appearing on this blogspot over the years unless someone can mail them to him without being intercepted by bureaucrats keen to see the status quo preserved.
PM Turnbull will be delegating more and more to his Ministers. So, if change has to happen it needs to be with the Minister's support and that is highly unlikely now that she has put her stake in the ground. As far as she is concerned it's all systems full steam ahead - the buck now stops with the illustrious members of the ACeH committee for at least the next 5 years!
The buck may stop with the ACeH, but if the eHealth Bill doesn't get through the Senate and if the AMA and other professional bodies are not on side, there will be gridlock.
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