Last week the SA Government sprang a small Bank Levy surprise on five unsuspecting banks. The banks, and the rest of the business community are less than impressed.
South Australia bank tax an act of 'economic vandalism'
Shock announcement: South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis delivers the state budget yesterday.
· Updated Jun 22 2017 at 9:21 PM
The Business Council of Australia has warned that Australia is rapidly becoming a "laughing stock" in global investment circles because of new taxes on banks as erratic decisions by both federal and state governments "carelessly undermine" the rules of doing business.
Australia's big four banks are furious about the move by the South Australian government to impose a new state-based version of the federal government's major bank levy, while the broader business community warned it was partly the fault of the Turnbull government for "letting the genie out of the bottle" in the first place.
The new state-based tax of 0.015 per cent on liabilities is forecast to raise $370 million over the next four years and was one of the revenue raising measures announced in South Australia's budget on Thursday.
The tax will be raised on top of the federal government's Major Bank Levy of 0.06 per cent on liabilities, which the government has forecast to raise $6.2 billion nationally over the next four years. The federal government's major bank levy passed into law on Monday evening after weeks of spirited public debate.
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Most think this was done to fill a budget whole but actually it was done to distract from the Health IT shambles SA finds it self in.
In just the last week we have seen this:
Coding errors cause 300,000-plus mismatches in South Australian medical imaging data
Brad Crouch, Medical Reporter, The Advertiser
June 20, 2017 7:47am
MORE than 300,000 medical images were wrongly labelled when SA Health moved them to a new computer system, raising the risk of “harm to patients through inaccurate diagnosis”.
The mix-ups include images of wrists being called feet, brains filed as chests and breasts classified as heads.
The Advertiser’s revelation of SA Health’s latest bungle comes amid a billion-dollar, pre-election spending spree on health by the State Government, with Labor MPs making announcements at Flinders Medical Centre, Modbury, Queen Elizabeth and Lyell McEwin hospitals.
Documents obtained by The Advertiser about the medical imaging debacle warn that patients may need more scans if doctors are unable to locate previous scans, with associated risks from radiation for children and women of child-bearing age.
The situation also raises risks where doctors check images for implanted medical devices and for comparisons to check on a patient’s progress, the documents warn.
Children being treated at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital are among those whose scans are affected.
The behind-schedule, over-budget electronic patient record system Enterprise Patient Administration System is being blamed for the massive mix-up, according to the internal documents.
But SA Health insists its new imaging system “is not connected with EPAS”.
The documents show “coding errors” are behind the fiasco where medical imaging such as MRI and CAT scans have been incorrectly labelled as they are shifted from the old Kestral system to the new Enterprise System for Medical Imaging.
The ESMI system’s programs were updated with new codes to align with codes in the troubled EPAS system, SA Health department documents indicate.
However, these new codes caused an avalanche of mismatches when uploading historical medical images to the new system.
The error affects most major hospitals apart from Flinders Medical Centre where management identified the problem last year and notified officials, resulting in an update to ensure a “like with like” result.
The transfer had already been undertaken — with resulting errors — at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Lyell McEwin Hospital and Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
An inquiry by SA Medical Imaging into the problem, which began last September, sought urgent feedback from staff including “negative patient outcomes”.
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and this:
SA Health takes disaster recovery gamble to save money
By Allie Coyne on Jun 20, 2017 5:27PM
Pathology systems overhaul running over time, budget.
South Australia's Health department has decided not to implement a secondary site for disaster recovery with its new state-wide pathology system in an effort to save costs from a project that is running late and over budget.
In late 2015, the state's audit office looked into SA Health's enterprise pathology laboratory information system (EPLIS) overhaul and warned it was likely to run out of money before it was complete.
The project was funded from a 2012, $30.4 million investment to replace two ageing and incompatible Cirdan Ultra instances and as many as 30 smaller pathology systems across in labs and hospitals across the state.
SA Health in 2014 signed a contract with Cerner to introduce its Millennium suite of pathology lab information modules, signalling the start of the transformation.
But just one year later the audit office found that the agency had bungled a couple of key components and was at serious risk of running out of money, with no contingency funding to dip into.
One of those key components included an assumption that the solution could run out of a single high availability data centre, according to the auditors.
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I think South Australians deserve a great deal better than all this and Australia needs to be as free as possible or random taxation decisions to fill coffers those who came before have emptied.
Really hopeless!
David.
If SA simply renames the system all will be well, I suggest the Picasso Imaging System
ReplyDeleteSA government may just have shot themselves in the foot, the banks can either simply pass on to the consumer or move interstate.
ReplyDeleteAs for the eHealth issue, what would be the case if these as Tim foresees become automatically uploaded to the myhr? How easy would it be to clean out of the myhr and all other systems that may have downloaded information that is incorrectly labelled. Does not sound cheap or safe.
the more data uploaded to myhr the more useless it will become. bring it on guys.
ReplyDeleteSo it would seems that Electronic Health Records didn’t eliminate medical errors, they just created some new ones and proliferate on a grand scale. Will the Strategy SWOT analysis call this out and factor countermeasures? Has the CEO's trusty GP sidekick have research underway to measure the number of instances of EHR related errors and the direct impact to patient healthcare and safety?
ReplyDeleteDoes "the CEO's trusty GP sidekick have research underway to measure the number of instances of EHR related errors" ?
ReplyDeleteOf course she has. As Professor of General Practice advising on all things eHealth what self-respecting professorial clinical advisor wouldn't have such important research underway?