[LINK] Electronic medical records: why we should seek a second

[Jan Whitaker]

At 08:47 PM 20/12/2011, Frank O'Connor wrote:
>Nah ... Far better to keep raising objections, stop the show and 
>stave off the day when eHealth becomes a reality .. whilst 
>continuing to feed insatiably at the public trough.

It's a bigger problem than that, Frank. I just spent *another* hour 
late last night reviewing another submission (what count are we up 
to, Roger?) about this abysmal project. It's a monster of poor 
project management, poor governance, poor risk analysis and 
mitigation, poor consultation, and horrible design. Gee, you might 
say, tell us what you really think!

If the govt is going to foist this upon the public, at an unknown, 
but well underestimated cost (my bet was $2-3 billion dollars MINIMUM 
for it to work), then it should be done right. They (Nehta and the 
Dept of Health and Aging who are involved in this) don't seem to 
understand the complexity of the system, the data legacy issues, the 
local implementation costs, the information flow problems, the human 
trust factors, the medico-legal liability problems, not to mention 
the privacy and other even greater major RISK problems, despite the 
same messages being provided over and over and over, WITH the 
accompanying research to back up the criticisms.

Their solution in the proposed legislation? Remove liability by the 
government and their agencies if anything happens as a result of 
reliance on the PCEHR, so the patient and their families and possibly 
the health provider (doctor) carry the can. It is a joke! If you were 
a professional with any risk sense, would you take that on? I sure wouldn't.

This isn't a case of feeding from the trough by the current 
interests. It's a case of people making decisions from a bureaucratic 
perspective without the necessary background and skills in designing 
a functional system of this scope and size and doing it for life and 
death of real people. The IT project during the Howard govt that fell 
in a heap is a row boat compared to this Titanic.

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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