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."

Friday, October 06, 2017

A Stalwart Of The Australian E-Health Scene Reveals Ongoing Frustration With Progress!

This appeared last week:

Australian health IT sage looks back to the future and sees what went wrong

Natasha Hancock | 29 Sep 2017
He’s a visionary in the field whose seminal 2004 BMJ paper predicted the ways healthcare would be transformed by technology, but as we approach his 2020 deadline Professor Enrico Coiera says companies have held back progress and patients are still being put at risk.
It must have seemed such a long way away, but Coiera boldly foretold the future when he described a 2020 in which technology was assimilated into clinical practice.
“The world may be such that as a clinician you work in flexible virtual teams and some of your colleagues are computers. You would of course instinctively mistrust clinicians who always know the answer without consulting the information grid, and patients often choose to be the team leader,” Coiera, now Foundation Professor in Medical Informatics at Macquarie University and Director of the Centre for Health Informatics, wrote in 2004.
“Keyboards are banned as harmful and can be found in museums, next to punch cards and spittoons. The health record is a direct multimedia history of conversations, and a software agent is its curator. For the still cognitively limited clinician, your earring whispers your patient’s name when you meet.”
Keyboards remain and earrings are yet to whisper, but Coiera has greater disappointments when it comes to the pace of change.
“In terms of the IT that doctors use, compared to today you wouldn’t see much difference, to be honest. Many of the electronic record systems that people use in hospitals today feel pretty much like the systems of back then,” he told Healthcare IT News Australia.
“The problem with ‘clunky’ user experiences for medical record systems is that people may not enter the data as much as they should or as well as they should or they omit things. There are also lots of people doing cutting and paste, rather than writing new notes, and that brings in errors.”
Lots more found here:
I have known Enrico for a fair few years now (20 years +) and I know has main interest is to see technology actually deliver on its promise while being at the same time pretty clear eyed on just what the obstacles and barriers are!
It’s worth reading the full article and also many of his papers around utility and safety in Health IT! The path he is traveling is a complex and difficult one and the answers are still by no means clear
David.

5 comments:

Andrew McIntyre said...

I would suggest that the government imposed agenda of this century has delayed progress and rewarded the wrong outcomes. We would be much better off if they just got out of the way and stopped trying to "help" Then users will buy software that they find useful.

We do have a need for standards compliance for results that travel between 2 parties which is the main role for government, but they have neglected to do their job on that front so we are in a total mess.

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

Andrew,

I totally agree.

The government used to have a policy of not picking winners - let the market/industries work it out themselves.

With PCEHR/MyHR not only have they tried to pick a winner, they have tried to build it and implement it themselves. IMHO, a fail on all accounts.

Anonymous said...

According to an article in Pulse last week we apparently are a few nay sayers and the government radiates enough solar energy from there rumps to fix the energy crisis.

Anonymous said...

I read that article, still trying to work out what it was about and why certain things were even stated. The ADHA must has a reason behind it madness? They just seem lost and looking desperately to be loved.

Anonymous said...

you mean a couple of journalists with little or no experience in health/IT/government service delivery know more than a bunch of experts with years of practical experience?

Welcome to the dystopian future......