Hi everyone, I have had an interesting experience during the past 24 hours. On Friday afternoon I rang Robert Wood at NEHTA to discuss a couple of things; mainly issues related to my dissatisfaction at NEHTA's progress on progressing matters related to electronic messaging. In the course of our discussion I said to Robert that I viewed NEHTA as having an over-arching role of enabling Australian healthcare make the TRANSITION from paper-based systems to electronic ones. Robert corrected me, saying that use of the word Transition in the NEHTA name refers to the fact that it is a temporary organisation and therefore actually a "transitional arrangement" that will cease or transfer to something else in due course. I have been expecting NEHTA to bowl in and take overall responsibility for making things change, Robert says (and I have heard other NEHTA staff echo this), that they take no responsibility for actual change happening or the lack of any change to date and that they exist therefore to develop technical specifications and architectures in the hope that they will be implemented. If this is the case, who does have responsibility for leading the transition? Straight away, I polled a couple of other people . They also saw NEHTA's Transition role as an overall responsibility to enable a TRANSITION from a paper-based health system to an electronic one. They too had shared my interpretation of the word "transition". I still cannot believe that such ambiguity exists. How do other members of this group view the word "Transition" within the NEHTA mandate? Kind regards, Tom Bowden
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