For your reading pleasure the Annual Report (2018-2019) for the ADHA is found here:
https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/about-the-agency/publications/reports/annual-report/Annual_Report_Australian_Digital_Health_Agency_2018-2019_Online.pdf
Feel free to download to find out a lot of information you really did not need to know! There are a few tidbits like the salaries of senior staff and the advertising and market research spending however!
They also mention a few data-breaches. I thought there weren't any?
There is a proper press report on the Annual Report here:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/my-health-record-data-breaches-fall-533460
David.
7 comments:
Please understand, the Annual Report is primarily intended for political consumption by Health Ministers in the 9 jurisdictions and their Health Department Heads, other Politicians, Treasury and Finance Departments and Peak Bodies like the AMA and the CHF.
I agree, apart from being a statutory requirement, its purpose is to secure funding for the year ahead and neutralise the naysayers, like this blog.
It also looks to me as though it's been written to reassure the ANAO that they know what they are doing and are firmly on track as per the ADHA Charter.
It looks like the same tired uninspired dribble they came up with in year one which was just a repeat of NEHTA efforts. One difference being that they seemingly have been told to undo the damage they caused around standards. The “internal workplan” highlights what many know or suspect. ADHA is broken. Love the way we are supposed to trust an organisation with duplicated records of our health when they have no records management and presumably no idea about information governance.
This is section 2.4.5 Interoperability and data quality
Overview
The future success of digital health in Australia rests strongly on the ability of the health sector to share and use information. Around the world, governments are recognising the importance – sometimes describing this as a right – for people to be able to have their records move seamlessly across organisational, state and even national boundaries. Interoperability between clinical systems is both the greatest challenge of digital health and its greatest promise. A connected health system gives clinicians access to the most complete information available: a patient’s medical history, including allergies, medicines and pre-existing conditions, maximising the opportunities for optimal outcomes.
Results
Over 2018 – 19, the interoperability program took significant foundational steps in making interoperability a reality. Noteworthy achievements included:
* Undertaking an extensive co-design process with wide-ranging stakeholder engagement, which resulted in the development of a national health interoperability roadmap. A community standards development model is in development to support collaborative standards development across industry – recommending a working structure, development processes, organisation roles and responsibilities, governance and ongoing operational support.
* Partnering with the CSIRO to deliver the Master Drug Catalogue review paper that outlines the problem statement, high-level requirements and scope for master medicines data management.
* The development of a maturity model for interoperability and associated assessment tools to support stakeholder self-assessment and implementation planning is being progressed.
-end
Notice what's missing? Data quality.
They either conflate interoperability and data quality or have no idea about the data quality in the system.
The fact that interoperability of poor quality data can injure or potentially kill people makes it rather important.
How come the HIMAA haven't pointed this out? Or are they happy to just manage whatever rubbish is in someone's health record?
How come the AMA or RACGP don't bring this up?
The ADHA spins Digital Health as the application of Technology to healthcare. That's easy - just take whatever technology a vendor pushes and make believe it's being used to improve healthcare.
Everyone seems dazzled by the bright lights of technology.
Have a read of this report,
"Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout A Systems Approach to Professional Well-being" from the National Academy of Sciences, previously the Institute of Medicine.
It includes this:
* Technology can either contribute to clinician burnout (e.g., poorly designed electronic health record technologies) or potentially reduce clinician burnout (e.g., well-functioning patient communications clinical decision support) if it is well designed, implemented, and integrated into clinical workflow
Do a search on "physician burnout" and you'll soon find out that much of the technology being adopted falls into the first category - it's contributing to burnout.
The report is in the USA context but Australia is not that different. The Report doesn't really (IMHO) address the root causes of the problems facing healthcare, but at least they have identified and acknowledged the symptoms.
The ADHA is either studiously ignoring the issue of the data that sits in their toy system or is unaware of the real purpose and value of medical data and the risks associated with poor quality data.
In either case, IMHO, the ADHA is wasting everyone's time and money and distracting from the real problems facing healthcare.
Releasing it on Melbourne Cup day means that one major distraction has been used up. Wonder what they have in mind for the ANAO report? If there is another delay, then maybe they are aiming for the UK general election on December 12. Or Christmas Eve.
"The ADHA is either studiously ignoring the issue of the data that sits in their toy system or is unaware of the real purpose and value of medical data and the risks associated with poor quality data."
Its not because they have not been told. Medical-Objects withdrew from a project because they insisted on dumbing down the data to pdf with no atomic data what so ever, despite the facts that the standards have existed for over a decade. Vendors say they can't do the atomic stuff in the PR driven time frame so it just gets changed to pdf to meet some announced target date.
If you establish that as the "Standard" then it will be locked in place for a decade. The whole government eHealth debacle has prevented implementation of the existing standards for a decade and now to get a "quick win" they want to dumb it down further to what is essentially a efax system and does not deliver the benefits of eHealth.
Its time to stop wasting money on national eHealth bodies that are clueless, in fact they just need to be disbanded and be replaced by an expectation of standards compliance. We have standards, if they are used by anyone they should be compliant for the sake of patient safety. Dumbing them down further without even any compliance checks is just crazy.
Post a Comment