[LINK] Building the Australian National Health Network

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

There's an interesting podcast from the ABC's Rear Vision on Hospital 
Reform this week.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/rearvision/stories/2010/2834416.htm

> *Robin Gauld:* I spent some time in the US last year. I was there for 
> almost 12 months on a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellowship, and there 
> are some not-for-profit private healthcare systems in the [United] 
> States that work really, really well. And so these will be systems 
> which care for maybe a couple of million patients in a geographical 
> area. Of course it's funded by health insurance so the patients will 
> come with various different forms of funding when they go to see their 
> GP or hospital or whatever. But the system will consist of Head 
> Office, and then maybe a cluster of hospitals, and then a number of 
> primary care physicians and so forth working across a region.
>
> Now some of the really, really good ones have decided that information 
> technology is the heart of improving the health care system, that 
> without good information technology and infrastructure for the 
> transfer of accurate and swift information, then you're not going to 
> be able to get the improvements happening. And so they have electronic 
> patient records which are universally accessible across the region to 
> any health care provider who's a part of that system. They tend to 
> have very, very strong clinical leadership, and so they'll be led by a 
> doctor by and large, and that will be a practising doctor, not someone 
> who's a full-time bureaucrat as such, or manager, but it will be a 
> doctor who probably practises a half-day a week, then they spend the 
> rest of their time in their sort of managerial, clinical leadership role.
>
> They will also have a very, very strong medical and nursing and other 
> allied practitioner representation at the board table and at the 
> highest management levels and then throughout the organisation.
>
The wheel has been invented. The problem is that our public service 
bureaucrats aren't as interested in health outcomes as they are in 
health funding.

Question: why should a health authority be paid for the number of sick 
people they treat, rather than the number of people (healthy and sick) 
they support? They have no incentive to keep people healthy. In fact 
they are incented to let people get sick.

-- 
 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au