This appeared last week:
21 November 2017
How to succeed with digital innovation in health
Dr Steve Hodgkinson has a message for digital health innovators: the longer a project takes, the more likely it is to fail.
Dr Hodgkinson, the CIO at Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services, has overseen the launch of around 30 new applications in the past 18 months, with products delivered in as little as six weeks, and none taking longer than six months.
The thinking behind a swift roll-out was that it gave stakeholders a sense of how the application would work and provided an opportunity for feedback early in the process.
Rather than taking 18 months or two years to develop the “perfect” system, the department used existing cloud platforms to get a working model up as soon as possible and then executed the design based on user feedback.
This transparency promoted organisational learning and made people feel energised and excited about the project, Dr Hodgkinson said.
“Just getting started is the thing,” he said, speaking at Microsoft’s “Creating a Digital Difference” event in Sydney this month.
The department launched a thunderstorm asthma early-warning system in October, in partnership with the Bureau of Meteorology, the University of Melbourne, and Deakin University. The computing work was done by Microsoft’s Azure platform.
The system gave three days’ warning of a likely event and sent notifications to the public through the Vic Emergency app.
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This strategy, which Dr Hodgkinson named “Platform+Agile”, could be useful for the development of a range of digital health systems, he said. “But electronic health records it is a more complicated conversation,” he said.
Digital health often feels stuck in the mud, with systems unable to talk to each other and projects such as My Health Record eating into $2 billion without much to show for it.
Part of the problem was that government was trying to create “a single system to rule them all”, which was neither necessary nor practical in a fragmented sector like health, Dr Hodgkinson said.
A better solution would be for government to become an “intelligent consumer” of global digital services.
Lots more here:
As I recall the so called ‘soft launch’ of the PCEHR (as it then was) happened on July 1, 2012 after about 2 years of development.
You can relive the period with this fantastic collection of memorabilia found here:
This means rather than taking six months the shambles has so far taken at least 7 years – hardly ‘agile’ .
And now we know it is going further with opt-out and all these new data feeds in 2018.
On the basis of value for money and duration this is really doomed I reckon – we have all been suffering for far too long!
David.
It is is good to put together quick solutions but maintaining those solutions in the long term will come at a cost. After > 15 years of national authorities "helping" us with eHealth we should have a solid backbone of highly compliant messages with high quality terminology and atomic data that could be used to build the type of systems they want quickly.
ReplyDeleteIf the quality of the data is terrible you may as well hack together a solution that screen scrapes and looks for suggestive words but its never going to be as reliable as it should be. We have proven that trying to build complex systems on top of quicksand is unreliable, costly and produces unacceptable delays. Perhaps time for some work on the foundations before we try and add another floor onto the building?