This appeared this morning.
E-health key trial halted by specifications glitch
- by: Sean Parnell
- From: The Australian
- January 24, 2012
MOST of the trial sites for the federal government's electronic health record project have been taken offline after it was discovered they were working to different specifications than the planned national model.
The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) halted the rollout of primary care desktop software at 10 trial sites on Friday blaming incompatibility with the national specifications.
It is the latest blow for the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) project, which has attracted $466 million in federal funding over two years and is considered vital to efforts to combat preventable and chronic disease.
The national specifications were updated in November and the problems, which have not been detailed, affect most of the Wave 1 and Wave 2 sites: Metro North Brisbane Medicare Local, Inner East Melbourne Medicare Local, Hunter Urban Medicare Local, Accoras in Brisbane South, Greater Western Sydney, St Vincent and Mater Health Sydney, Calvary Health Care ACT, Cradle Coast Electronic Health Information Exchange in Tasmania, the Northern Territory Department of Health and Families, and Brisbane's Mater Misericordiae Health Services.
Only the Medibank Private and Fred IT group sites are unaffected. The Defence Department's Joint e-Health Data and Information also appears to be safe.
NEHTA is expected to renegotiate contracts, keen to salvage what it can from the trial, and determine how to migrate data across to the national system which is due to go live on July 1.
A NEHTA spokesman would not answer specific questions about the issue, but confirmed it was "pausing implementation of the primary care desktop software development".
"NEHTA is acting after internal checks detected issues in the latest release of its specifications in November 2011," he said.
"This is about quality control to ensure absolute confidence in the software being used in the e-Health pilot sites. One of the reasons for having these sites was to test software and "iron out the bugs' prior to the national infrastructure going live."
More here:
What is going on here is utterly predictable when you have a whole series of pilots based on different technologies being conducted in isolation and then expected somehow to magically form a coherent national system.
With all those well paid architects NEHTA should have known this - I have been saying it for years - and really it is an example of utter planning failure.
NEHTA has just managed to prove itself to be utterly incompetent and is becoming the instigator of yet another failing over-reaching national e-Health Program.
The wise men who said you should learn to walk before running where spot on!
As for delivering a system that actually does anything useful by June 30 - dream on!
As for delivering a system that actually does anything useful by June 30 - dream on!
David.
