Abbott botches up - Passes the buck. http://bloggers.laborfirst.com.au/bloggers/blog.asp?entryId=67247
Posted by Rex R | Monday, 13 February 2006 10:36 PM Bucketloads of self-congratulatory backslapping and smiles all round at COAG last week as the Premiers and Prime Minister announced $1.1 billion worth of funding to improve Australia’s medical services. It’s called the Better Health For All Australians Action Plan Among the initiatives proposed by COAG is this one: From February 2006, governments will accelerate work on a national electronic health records system to improve safety for patients and increase efficiency for health care providers by developing the capacity for health providers, with their patient’s consent, to communicate safely and securely with each other electronically about patients and their health. “What is this national electronic health records system they are referring to?” I hear you croak as your eyes glaze over and you wonder if the world will ever be rid of those insufferable computer geeks? Quite simply it is computer system that allows the hospitals and your doctor to access to a vast databank which contains some or all of your medical history , no matter which doctors you’ve been to see over the years. Up until now, whenever you visited your local quack he (or she) would write out the prescription and make notes about you in a paper file and shove it in their filing cabinet to be updated next time you came feeling crook. The problem with this is that you might be seeing other doctors at the same time, and they might be prescribing you things which don’t interact well with your other prescriptions, or they might suggest a treatment that is not compatible with what the other doctor is doing. Therefore having a system where instead of the filing cabinet, all the medical history is kept in a big computer system and can all be shared, can stop mistakes and can save costs and save lives. Basically having a system like this is a good idea, and actually the idea has been around for a while. Not only that but the Government has been working on it for a long long time. And it probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that it has consumed millions of dollars of tax payers money and it still doesn’t work. This grand idea is called HealthConnect, and it’s a classic example of yet another Federal Government IT botch up. And now through some tricky manoeuvring it’s become the States’ problem. Back in 2001 this HealthConnect project began under the control of the then Health Minister Kay Patterson, and they’ve been tipping millions into the hat ever since. Lots of consulting firms were engaged and lots of Power Point presentations were prepared, and HealthConnect happily ticked away spending your money for the next four years. In April 2005 the Productivity Commission was critical of the supposed benefits of the system that were being touted by the big consulting firms who had attached themselves to the Government teat. Then in June 2005 the current Health Minister Tony Abbott chucked a wobbly about the progress of HealthConnect at a breakfast for IT geeks. He threatened that heads would roll if it wasn’t going in twelve months. Health Minister Tony Abbott has put federal health IT bureaucrats on notice saying he expects tangible results within a year, specifically functioning electronic health records and accompanying smartcard system - or heads would start to roll. Of course that’s just what the project needed. Some jumped up power junkie of a Health Minister, whose chief talent is kicking heads, setting deadlines that had no hope of being met. He was warned that his deadline was ludicrous. Health Minister Tony Abbott's ambitious plan to have an electronic health record system operational is highly unlikely to meet a 12 month timeframe according to Dr David More, adjunct professor of Health Informatics at the University of Canberra. Raising serious doubts about the federal government's ability to meet Abbott's strict schedule, Dr More said the only way the deadline can be met is if doctors get a working client system that is linked to HealthConnect up and running within the next few months. Soon afterward there was a big shake-up and earlier this year the responsibility for HealthConnect was handballed to a completely different body called NeHTA, which is jointly owned by the States and the Feds. But NeHTA was not funded to tackle such a complex project. Over the past year, observers say, the federal Government has changed tack, passing responsibility for e-health back to the states through NeHTA. At the same time, it has quietly scrapped plans for HealthConnect, the planned electronic health records network. Instead, HealthConnect is being touted as a change-management strategy. Meanwhile, it's unclear how the newly corporatised NeHTA can fund its greatly increased workload. Its base funding for three years, of about $21 million, is shared by federal, state and territory governments So sneaky Minister Abbott, realising that he was on a hiding to nothing has quietly palmed off responsibility to the States. The federal Government's sidestep on e-health funding may land Prime Minister John Howard in difficulties later this year, as the realisation dawns that state governments will bear most of the cost of providing a nationwide health information infrastructure. Now with this GOAG announcement it’s official. The States now own HealthConnect. There’s nothing wrong with that per se provided that they all cooperate and it does become a national system, but where’s the accountability for the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that the Howard Government has spent on HealthConnect so far? What have they achieved with this money? If there were mistakes made, then Tony Abbott needs to explain what they were and why so that the States don’t end up wasting millions themselves. Tony Abbott, as Minister, should be accountable for Health Department botch ups. Instead however we have Minister Abbott quietly shifting this multi-million dollar failure out of his portfolio, at the very same time as he thinks decisions about RU486 should be kept within his portfolio for ‘moral reasons’. What about his moral responsibility for the tens of millions pissed up against the wall? Next time we hear Minister Abbott talk about taking responsibility for hospitals off the States and creating a single gigantic national health system under Federal control, a hugely complex operation if ever there was one, we should be asking ourselves is Tony Abbot really the right man for the job, if he can’t get one single national computer system working, how could he possible expect to get an entire health sector working under Federal control? --- _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
