[LINK] Government wasting $485M on failed eHealth system

[Stephen Loosley]

Dear Chris, Bernard and Linkers,

Much respect for your opinions and experience gents, but we **need** an eHealth system.

By "we" I mean our community. We choose to live in a wheatbelt Vic community of 800 souls. In many ways life here is ideal. And there are many such towns, an oasis for the soul, just like ours, But there is one real problem. We have a doctor here one afternoon a week, sometimes. Often not at all.

A 'permanent' (office hours) doctor is a 90klm round trip, and a hospital is a 200klm round trip.

Now, every specialist wants their own test results. Apparently it's much easier for them to ask we patients to get fresh tests than to access existing test results. For elderly folk, this is a very significant problem. Numbers just give up on medical intervention. It's all too hard. And they die.

If Australia wants our food and fibre, your providers living here need and deserve, at the very least and as a matter of urgency, widely accessable medical recording and reliable tele-health to avoid future distance-deaths. We need them NOW thanks! We are so over our poor bastard Men's Shed blokes dying from an all-too-hard distance-death syndrome. Plug us in now please.

Then, as soon as is socially/technically practicable, ALL of our sorry-arse country folk urgently require and certainly thoroughly deserve, a full suite of the following .. if this country is going to increasingly depend on the results (that is, to eat, wear and export) of all our labours going forward.


* Electronic health records: enabling the communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists etc.);

*Computerized Physician Order Entry: a means of requesting diagnostic tests and treatments electronically and receiving the results

* ePrescribing: access to prescribing options, printing prescriptions to patients and sometimes electronic transmission of prescriptions from doctors to pharmacists

* Clinical Decision Support: providing information electronically about protocols and standards for healthcare professionals to use in diagnosing and treating patients

* Telemedicine: physical and psychological diagnosis and treatments at a distance, including telemonitoring of patients functions;

* Consumer health informatics: use of electronic resources on medical topics by healthy individuals or patients;

* Health knowledge management: e.g. in an overview of latest medical journals, best practice guidelines or epidemiological tracking (examples include physician resources such as Medscape and MDLinx);

* Virtual healthcare teams: consisting of healthcare professionals who collaborate and share information on patients through digital equipment (for transmural care);

* mHealth or m-Health: includes the use of mobile devices in collecting aggregate and patient level health data, providing healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vitals, and direct provision of care (via mobile telemedicine);

* Medical research using Grids: powerful computing and data management capabilities to handle large amounts of heterogeneous data

* Healthcare Information Systems: also often refer to software solutions for appointment scheduling, patient data management, work schedule management and other administrative tasks surrounding health


Thanks for listening guys and gals ..

Stephen


BRD writes,

>
> On 15-May-15 12:54 AM, Chris Johnson wrote:
> > The Electronic Health Record project is just one of those impossible
> > things. No more money! stop it now. It's beyond the Auditor-General,
> > it's beyond everyone.
> ...
> > The failure is collective: there is no small group of individuals who
> > failed to say "no, minister" (or "no, permanent secretary"), it's
> > collective hubris.
>
> Hubris - a word I have used myself in this context.
>
> IMHO, the arrogance starts with a piece of flawed logic: "IT has been
> successfully used in many areas, therefore it should be used for health
> records." The PCEHR is a technical solution applied in an area where the
> technology is only a very small part of the problem. As Chris points
> out, the social
> constraints and drivers are worse than the technical requirements. I'd
> put them at least an order of magnitude worse.
>
> The first step in creating health information systems (that's
> information systems, not IT) is to recognise that it's all about how
> better use of information can lead to changes in the way health care
> works. Very few, if any, IT professionals know anything about how health
> care works. The number of people (including health care workers, public
> servants, IT professionals and even health infomatics people) who know
> how health care systems could be significantly improved through better
> processes based upon enhanced information is probably close to zero.
>
> Until this is recognised, nothing the government does will work.
> Progress in health information systems has to be made slowly,
> experimentally and carefully. We are in uncharted waters and people's
> lives are at risk.
>
> --
>
> Regards
> brd
>
> Bernard Robertson-Dunn
> Sydney Australia
> email: brd at iimetro.com.au
> web: www.drbrd.com
> web: www.problemsfirst.com
> Blog: www.problemsfirst.com/blog
>