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, May 24, 2017

Senate Estimates Covering The ADHA Happening Next Monday 29 May 2017

Here is the plan:

GROUP B: Committees in this group will hold public hearings on estimates from Monday, 29 May to Friday, 2 June 2017

Community Affairs (PDF 96KB)
Health and Aged Care: Monday, 29 May and Tuesday, 30 May 2017
Social Services: Wednesday, 31 May and Thursday, 1 June 2017
Human Services: Thursday, 1 June 2017            

The ADHA session appears to be scheduled for Monday evening - but things can be a bit flexible!

Here is the link to the schedules:

http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Senate_Estimates/Estimates_daily_programs

David.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if we are about to see why the CEO gets paid. Will he run rings around the Senators? Or are they up to it? If they can get things off the rehearsed messages and asks some investergative questions we may learn some truths.

Anonymous said...

The late late session, the senators will be wanting to go home. Just what will they inquire about? I am not sure if there is much to talk about we are kind of in a no substance phase. Any ideas anyone?

Anonymous said...

Not much time will be allotted to the ADHA. Tim, Meredith and the Senior Managers will attend in force. The Department officials, Secretary and Paul Madden, will sit behind ready to fill up any holes the ADHA might accidentally dig.

The Senators will be wanting to hear about all the progress that has been made. There's plenty to talk about to fill in the time. Everyone will then retire to the bar for celebrations. The world will move on.

Anonymous said...

I would like the Senate Committee to investergate why the ADHA is laying off all ex-NEHTA staff and in the process robbing the community of hundreds of years of collective experience and knowledge of eHealth, it takes many years for people to grasp the relationships between clinical, technical, policy and the construct of health information, workflows and constraints etc... the issue was never with the dedicated and highly skilled staff, it was always with the narrow minded, self serving supposed leadership that caused more harm than good because they either did not want to listen, or were so confident in their own self belief and personal power they refused to consider hard facts. In defence, many were also hamstrung by the Department.

So we have a situation where we have simply changed one problem with another version of the same problem, worse their answer to the problem is to cut away the healthy parts to allow the problem to get bigger and go unchallenged.

You cannot fix something until you are willing to admit there is a problem. We are seeing a natural emergence of technology and clinical practice, just when these highly skilled folks are needed the most, along comes the MyHR and squashes everything out, it was the same when PCEHR went live, the so called leaders removed a swathe of highly skilled subject matter experts.

Anonymous said...

Highly skilled experienced staff are a risk to generic management as they won't follow corporate policy when its silly and misguided. Much better to have troups that will blindly follow orders to attack hill MyEHR despite the futility. You must avoid having Key employees in the corporate world, only the managers can be important, the rest must be serfs and follow policy and job descriptions to the letter. Only then can you continue to feast on government $$ with no hope of any task being completed and ensure your long term viability as an organisation. This is generic management 101.

Anonymous said...

6:55am hit the nail on the head IMHO.

Anonymous said...

The Department officials, Secretary and Paul Madden

Be interesting to see if Mr Madden does attend, I notice he is no longer a Board Member of the ADHA. Guess there are greener less questioning pastures out there, hopefully not in genomics or home care pastures.

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

"Be interesting to see if Mr Madden does attend, I notice he is no longer a Board Member of the ADHA"

Very Interesting....

The legislation establishing ADHA says this:

"Section 20
Prerequisites and procedures for appointment of Board members

(1) This section applies to the appointment of Board members, including the Board Chair.

(2) One of the members must have the skills, experience or knowledge in the field mentioned in paragraph 19(3)(g) and must be an SES officer in the Department who is nominated in writing by the Secretary of the Department.

.... etc"

Where paragraph 19(3)(g) is:

"A person is eligible for appointment as a Board member only if the Health Minister is satisfied that the person has skills, experience or knowledge in at least one of the following fields:

...

(g) developing, implementing and managing national digital health policies, strategies and services;"

Paul Madden was certainly an SES officer and probably claimed that he had those skills, which he no doubt did, although if successfully applied is open to question.

The replacement for Paul Madden appears to be the Secretary of the Department of Health Martin Bowles. No other board member is a Federal Government SES officer, so I guess he's the one to whom Section 20, (2) applies.

However, according to his ADHA bio, Mr Bowles has had no experience "developing, implementing and managing national digital health policies, strategies and services" and I doubt that as Secretary he would have acquired those skills since joining the department.

I wonder if his appointment is legal?

Maybe someone at Senate Estimates on Monday could ask him .........

Anonymous said...

There is a reasonable chance the Opt-out could become the unwelcomed nail in the current Governments political coffin, probably not a disaster they would need in a years time.

Anonymous said...

@4.59 PM - "Be interesting to see if Mr Madden does attend, I notice he is no longer a Board Member of the ADHA"

Surely that cannot be true. He wouldn't jump ship and dump everything on Tim Kelsey and Jim Birch (Chair) would he?

Now that he is providing "executive leadership for the National Cancer Screening Register Programme" which also got into big trouble a few months back he may find calmer waters ahead.

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/health-profile-madden.htm

Maybe he feels his job in Project Managing the Department's 'exit' from the PCEHR-MyHR fiasco is all but done!!

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

The only thing of interest I can find in the Senate Estimates Committee Hansard report is this:

"Senator SINGH: Just getting back to this quote from the minister, in his speech at the AMA conference on Friday, he said:

But the great challenge is the issue of ensuring it works for the medical workforce. And so now we are going to a consultative period over the next few months on real initiatives to assist the medical workforce in their work…

Can you tell me about these consultations.

Mr Kelsey: I was actually at the conference last week. The point the minister was making is that the agency is working very closely with colleagues in states and territories in peak bodies in frontline clinical service to develop a whole range of improvements to My Health Record that will drive increased clinical benefits on which this measure is dependent. For example, we now have the first uploads of public pathology in New South Wales into My Health Record. We will shortly be announcing the first uploads of private pathology, private radiology and views of medications dispensed in community pharmacy. These are the kinds of content that will drive clinical practice, which has been sought after by peak bodies and clinicians on the ground. That is what the minister was referring to. It is certainly a period of very close collaboration as we design the program for implementation of the national expansion in close collaboration with clinical leaders."

ADHA is now betting the bank on uploading public and private pathology, private radiology and views of medications dispensed in community pharmacy.

The aim (guess?) is that this might reduce the number of tests performed.

This isn't exactly eHealth or any health related benefit, it is purely financial. It's also just using MyHR as a glorified messaging system.

If they ever implemented secure messaging it would take benefits (if there are any) away from MyHR, so don't expect that to happen any time soon.

Any idea of a coherent health summary or record went out the window years ago. The strategy now seems to be to fill the MyHR up with as much health data (some of it claims data with little or no medical value) as possible under the mistaken (IMHO) view that more is better.

Anonymous said...

I am not entirely sure the ADHA can claim any victory in this space, this has being in negotiation (technically and business) for a longtime. These changes don't happen over night. Interested in how these uploads get rejected if inderviduals opt out or currently have not opted in. is Tim stripping Australians of their right to choose?