While bureaucrats are happily busy preparing to collate personal health information (supplied to them by everyone from doctors through to chemists and optometrists) in order to satisfy Federal Health Minister Roxon’s unnatural desire for a great big database on Australian citizens, this is one of the computer systems from which this data will be drawn. It is said to be installed in 59 hospitals having an estimated 80 per cent of all NSW public hospital beds.
The Sydney Morning Herald 7 March 2011:
THE computer system that runs emergency departments in NSW hospitals is compromising patients' care, according to the first systematic review of the troubled project that found it was crippled by design flaws.
The FirstNet system allows treatment details and test results to be assigned inadvertently to the wrong patient, according to the review. It is based on a technical study of the software and interviews with directors of seven Sydney emergency departments.
The system is so compromised it should be scrapped, a specialist doctors' group said yesterday.
Difficulties retrieving patient records could delay treatment, and the system - on which $115 million has been spent - automatically cancelled pathology and radiology requests if the person was transferred from the emergency department without checking whether these were still needed, according to the study by Jon Patrick, the director of the University of Sydney's health information technology research laboratory.
Sally McCarthy, the president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said Professor Patrick's findings confirmed that the system, loathed by doctors and nurses, was unsuitable for its purpose.........
The project, part of a 10-year electronic medical records plan intended to make patient histories, X-rays and test results accessible from any hospital in the state, had proceeded too fast - apparently because of contractual obligations - for clinicians' feedback to influence it, Dr McCarthy said.
The potential for records to be linked to the wrong patient raised a serious risk they would be given incorrect treatment, she said, and the inability to compile multiple patient records into reports meant doctors could no longer evaluate new treatments or disease epidemics. "Simple audits and research projects are just impossible now," she said.
Really inspires confidence doesn’t it?
These difficulties are not confined to large metropolitan areas as this 2010 quote from the North Coast Area Health Service indicates:
In response to the difficulties our small sites experienced in using FirstNet, NCAHS continues to work with HSS to develop a FirstNet work flow for small rural sites.
Little appears to have changed since the 2009 implementation of this e-health software on the NSW North Coast.
If the reader happens to live in communities covered by the Hunter Urban Division of General Practice this sick software system is probably informing e-discharge summaries etc. forming part of the data collection trial run currently underway in the Newcastle and Hunter Valley region.
Building on these shifting sands, on 1 March 2011 Roxon’s baby, the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), awarded IBM a $23.6M dollar contract to develop nation-wide authentication system for electronic health records.
No comments:
Post a Comment