This appeared last week.
National EHR delayed as business case yet to go back to Cabinet
Tuesday, 30 October 2018 (0 Comments)
eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth
The National Electronic Health Record has been renamed the Health Information Platform, but the indicative business case has not gone back to Cabinet for approval.
An indicative business case for a National EHR was developed and presented to the Cabinet Committee on State Sector Reform and Expenditure Control in July 2017.
“It makes the case for change and looks at the options, requirements and deliverables of an EHR,” the Ministry of Health website says.
The committee requested further information on the costs and benefits of an EHR and these were expected to go back to Cabinet for approval in December 2017.
MoH group manager digital strategy and investment Darren Douglass says officials have been preparing a Cabinet paper seeking approval to proceed to development of a detailed business case for a national Health Information Platform.
More here:
What do you suppose is going on here?
An indicative business case is given to Cabinet about 16 months ago.
It was rejected as it was and was meant to be resubmitted after being re-worked but it is hard to say how far it has gone. Remember that this was just an indicative business case and there still does not seem to be agreement to go to detailed work.
Surely this long delay can only be because either the concept of a national EHR / Platform or the value proposition associated with it does not stack up.
For some background on the project here is what was said in 2015.
NZ announces plan for single national e-health record
Thursday, October 22, 2015 - 14:21
The New Zealand government has announced plans to build a single, national electronic health record (EHR) able to be accessed via portals and apps running on a variety of devices.
Minister of Health Dr Jonathan Coleman said a report on the benefits of an electronic health records had been commissioned from consulting firm Deloitte which found that there is growing international support for adopting a “Hybrid/Best of Suite strategy for Electronic Health Records, where a ‘single’ EHR is introduced to join up information held in a smaller number of Electronic Medical Record systems.”
The Deloitte report will be published shortly on the Ministry of Health website
In a speech to the Health Informatics New Zealand Conference held in Christchurch this week, Coleman said “As I travelled around meeting clinical leaders, patients and IT providers it became clear that our eHealth system was complicated, fragmented and not as user friendly as it could be.
“As I walk around hospitals I kept seeing examples of where individual clinicians have designed a stand-alone information system or programmes to use in their own unit – we end up with 20 different systems.
“In my view it intuitively makes sense to have a more uniform It environment with fewer systems, fewer vendors more standardisation and greater functionality.”
The EHR is expected to enable clinicians to view comprehensive patient information in one place. It will include a person’s allergies and alerts, medications and diagnostics, and will have clinical decision support tools.
More here:
There is more information from the Government here:
Reading all this it really seems the NZ Government is struggling to have a Business Case that is really viable so that it can be taken to the next step. These national EHR Programs are some how seen to be 'very good things' and get initiated often on pretty scant evidence. At least in NZ they seem to be being a little hard nosed about things - maybe because of what they see going on across the Tasman?
It seems here in OZ, of course, as far as anyone will say, no one has ever produced a Business Case for what we are actually doing with the myHR and we are all still wondering just what the real agenda is?
David.
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