This appeared last week:
My Health Record: almost $2bn spent but half the 23m records created are empty
The Australian government has spent $1.97bn since the system was introduced as the e-health record in 2009
Josh Taylor and Amy Corderoy
Thu 23 Jan 2020 03.30 AEDT
A decade since it was first announced, the federal government has spent close to $2bn on its troubled My Health Record system, and half of the 23m records created lie empty almost a year after the government made the system opt-out.
The former Labor government first proposed the e-health record system in 2009 as a means for patients, doctors and specialists to share patient history, X-rays, prescriptions and other medical information with ease.
The system was first launched in 2012 with little fanfare and very little uptake. In 2016, it was reported that after four years, only around 4 million people had created a record, and even fewer had actually had any information put in it.
The Coalition government then attempted to salvage the system by rebranding it to My Health Record and moving to make it opt-out in 2018, but the opt-out time period was extended to the start of 2019 amid concerns over security and law enforcement access to the records.
The Department of Health confirmed to the Guardian that since its inception as the personally-controlled e-health record back in 2009 the federal government had spent $1.97bn on the project.
“This includes the infrastructure development, implementation and ongoing operation of the My Health Record (formerly known as the personally controlled electronic health record system), and the operations of the digital health foundations (including Healthcare Identifiers and the National Authentication Service for Health) upon which the My Health Record system has been built,” a spokeswoman for the department said.
Despite the investment in the project, and the switch to opt-out – meaning people have to tell the Australian Digital Health Agency not to hold a record for them – take up of the My Health Record still remains low.
More than 90% of Australians have a My Health Record created for them, but just over half of those records have anything in them – of the 22.65m records, 12.9m have data in them.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners president, Dr Harry Nespolon, said that was an “enormous number” of empty records.
“This is always my argument about opting in, that if this was a service they actually wanted they would opt in.”
Nespolon said electronic medical records internationally had been plagued by difficulty, and “a lot of them had become white elephants”.
“We have always argued all the way that GPs are going to have to be the ‘curators’ of these records, and that takes time and effort,” he said.
“The question is, of these 10 million people [without information in records], do all 10 million really need a My Health Record?”
Lots more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/23/my-health-record-almost-2bn-spent-but-half-the-23m-records-created-are-empty
So basically we have spent about $2.0 billion on a system that the vast majority of the public could not care about and that 2.5 million took the active step to have nothing to do with by opting out!
What an astonishing figure of waste and stupidity – given it was known years ago the concept was basically flawed and obsolete!
At what point do we decide to do something different and evidence based to allow those who need to, to share private health information with those they authorise and want to while preserving privacy and security?
The world has move on from the #myHealthRecord concept and we need to move on too and stop wasting money!
David.
what about the cost to hospitals, medical centers, GPs, path labs? Time spent talking with patients about their shared summary?
ReplyDelete$2b is a minimum. Total cost more likely to be closer to $3b.
Benefits? A big resounding Nothing Reported.
Surely Dr Brendan Murphy, the newly appointed Secretary of Health is prepared comment. He now has to join the ADHA Board. Has his experience with ICT when CEO at Austin Health during the days of the Victoria's HealthSmart disaster given him any insight into why the My Health Record has been such an appalling waste of money. Let's face it, Brendan's Health Department has to carry at least 50% of these costs. The time for him to put his foot down is now before he is compromised by department bureaucrats.
ReplyDeleteWell it is not actually a direct cost to him it is simply tax revenue.
ReplyDeleteI was one of the first enthusiasts to think the NEHTA was a great idea. I signed up and they lost it. I signed up again to MyHR and in the last 3 years I've requested 2 GPs and 4 Specialists to load up my procedures and reports. Only one GP submitted my history. Generally, nobody cares at the Provider end. There are much better vendor products out there that integrate with the GPs EMR to the Patients Tablet that they can manage and share. It all smells like another Australia card - remember?
ReplyDeleteI's a bloody joke going nowhere - I give up