Tom Bowden wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > I have had an interesting experience during the past 24 hours.
A positively Damascene moment, it would seem, Tom. > 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. No, Robert is completely correct, and NEHTA grew out of a report in 2004 by the BCG (Boston Consulting Group, not Bacillus Calmette-Guérin...), commissioned by AHMC (Australian Health Ministers' Conference i.e. a joint committee of health ministers at State, Territory and Federal level), in response to dissatisfaction with the rate of progress in e-health nationally. BCG recommended that the confused mess of health IT governance committees, which included committees dominated by clinicians and health professionals but without any budgets or real power, and other committees with budgets and some power, but dominated by anodyne IT bureaucrats, be scrapped and hat a transitional authority be put in their place, with a view to sorting out the mess, establishing some clear direction, and then establishing better long-term governance structures for health IT. Thus, "transitional" always very clearly referred to governance of health IT, not actual progress with it. Presumably it was assumed that with better governance, a better rate of progress would result. Indeed, it still says on the NEHTA web site, under the "About NEHTA" link at http://www.nehta.gov.au/content/view/1/103/ : "NEHTA's origins lie in a meeting of Health Ministers on 29 July 2004, at which the Ministers endorsed the immediate formation of a National E-Health Transition Authority team, responsible for establishing a new national health information management and information and communication technology (IM&ICT) entity and, simultaneously, progressing work on the most urgent national IM&ICT priorities." Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
