>From what I have seen of AGPAL inspections or more the 'inspectors' I would not trust them to certify any software not even Solitare. The basic mistakes they make from purely an I.T. persective are a laughable. During one site inspection a GP was chastised for not locking his pc screen saver when he left the room leaving only the inspector in the room. He left the room as a receptionist banged on the door as she has a patient in reception who had severe chest pains. Note, there was no patient in the room just an AGPAL inspector who one would assume could be trusted. Then when the GP re-entered the room the inspector proceeded to explain how easy it is to lock the screen using the windows key and the letter L. How true but... The inspector then went on to say just use 'zz' as your password so its quick and easy to unlock. Gee how long is it going to take any patient to work the password out ? So the password is now worth ? I could fill pages with similar stories but that would only embarrass people.
So lets come up with a more I.T. creditible organisation to help Oz clinical software hey ! How do we rate the vendors support ? Run a website and request practice managers to log into it while they are waiting on hold and rate the responses ? Collate it over time with a live tally. HCN today - 7 min wait HCN calls logged today - 167 HCN time to talk to tech - 16 min HCN this month - 8 min wait HCN time to resolve issue - 3 months IBA today - 2 min wait IBA calls logged today - 54 IBA time to talk to tech - 59 min IBA this month - 8 min wait IBA time to resolve issue - 3 months Intrahealth today - 22 min wait Intrahealth calls logged today - 11 Intrahealth time to talk to tech - 22 min Intrahealth this month - 16 min wait Intrahealth time to resolve issue - what issue we have no issues :) Andrew Gold Coast. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Oliver Frank Sent: Saturday, 24 February 2007 3:31 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [email protected]; Ross Davey Subject: [GPCG_TALK] Re: [Nat-Div] Accredited software [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > It is an interesting suggestion that practices should only use > clinical software that has been approved by AGPAL and is itself- > accredited, by a new set of clincial software standards which is being mooted by Drs and Practice Managers. AGPAL and GPA do not set the standards for practices. The RACGP sets the standards and the accreditation organisations decide from their inspections whether a practice meets those standards. Who do you believe would set the standards for clinical software? If not the RACGP, what are your reasons for nominating another organisation? > > Suggestions for these new standards for clinical software are: > > 1. Acknowledgment and Response to users wishes with bug fixes, wish > lists, patches and updates - in a timely manner- reflective in a Users > Participation Survey I want my clinical software to know when I will be walking in to my surgery in need of a strong cappuccino, to order the cappuccino from the coffee shop across the way and have it delivered to my desk in time for when I sit down at it. If my clinical software vendor doesn't respond to this important wish on my wish list by developing and installing this very useful and much-needed feature within three months, I will give the vendor a bad rating in the AGPAL Users' Participation Survey. Are you seriously suggesting that AGPAL or anybody else could work out a way of rating a software vendors' quality of service in order to decide whether that vendor's product should be accredited? If I do rate my vendor's responsiveness to my demand for a prescient cappuccino-making function as grossly inadequate and that vendor or that software package fails to gain or loses AGPAL's accreditation, under your proposal one of the consequences will be that my practice will lose its own accreditation because it is using non-accredited software. This may not be the outcome that you had in mind. > > Why is software the only thing in a practice > which doesnt have to comply to some sort of standard!! Everything else does. I am not sure that this is true. There is not a standard governing every single good or service. It is my understanding that Standards published by Standards Australia come into existence only when an industry decides that there should be some standards for the goods or services produced by that industry, *and* when people and organisations in that industry commit their own time and money to the development of those Standards. The development of Standards is not funded by government. If this explanation about how Standards are developed is correct, one would expect the companies and organisations in the medical software industry to initiate *and fund* the development of appropriate Standards for their own industry. Why haven't they done this? I suspect that one reason is that they haven't felt the need, another is that they don't actually have enough resources to fund such an exercise, and a third may be that technological change will rapidly invalidate any Standards that are developed. I am not sure about any other reasons. I would be interested to hear from the Medical Software Industry Association its reasons. I will ask it and share the answer with the list. Alternatively, do you believe that GPs through one or more of our own organisations e.g. RACGP, ACRRM, AGPN, AMA, etc. should develop standards for clinical software? Do you believe that GPs will be willing to devote enough of their own time and money to develop the standards *and* to test clinical software against those standards, keeping in mind that every new version of each software package will need to be tested? Those of us who are nearly as old as Greg Markey will remember that in 1988 the RACGP under Dr. Michael Crampton's direction developed and published a set of standards for computer medical record systems, and offered to examine clinical software packages against this set of standards for a fee. The creation of these standards was a significant innovation that was recognised around the world. I witnessed this myself in 1993 at the conference of the British Computer Society in Harrogate, when a computer scientist working for the NHS' Sapphire software testing program held up the RACGP standards document and talked about its importance. Only one company, Medrecord, applied for the RACGP's software accreditation and if I remember correctly its software passed the test. I also remember very well the claim from other software vendors and from other parties that the standards had been written to suit Medrecord, with which the RACGP jointly was conducting the Computer-Assisted Practice Project (CAPP). The CAPP project was to examine the effects on practices and on quality of care of implementing clinical computer systems. Ross Davey was, I think, an executive of Medrecord at the time and Peter MacIsaac ran the CAPP project. They and Michael Crampton, if he is reading this or somebody points it out to him, may care to comment or to tell you more about what happened at the time. A few years later IBM was funded by Australian federal government to produce a set of specifications of essential and desirable functions of clinical software. IBM did a good job and produced a sensible and comprehensive report, but despite general approval of that report, it was never put to any real use and is now largely out of date. In the early 2000s, General Practice Computing Group addressed the challenge of software accreditation and funded some work to try to develop a system, but we all know what happened to GPCG. So you see, this idea of accrediting software is not new and has a long history in Australian GP informatics, still without any system of accreditation having been developed. > What about ISO9000 ? Can you say how expecting software vendors to gain ISO 9000 accreditation would achieve what you are looking for? At least one or two software vendors do have ISO 9000 series accreditation. For example Hatrix displays the ISO 9001 logo on its Website at http://www.hatrix.com.au/ . -- Oliver Frank, general practitioner 255 North East Road, Hampstead Gardens, South Australia 5086 Phone 08 8261 1355 Fax 08 8266 5149 Mobile 0407 181 683 _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
