'es mad about e health.

I got emailed an article in Computerworld this week, which seem

This article seems to be based on the rants of one individual who is blogging on this topic. The fact that one of the main objectives of this person's blog is to "provide commentary on what seems to have become the lamentable state of e-Health in Australia" and "to foster improvement" is hilarious. Obviously there will be a negative perspective of a topic irrespective of any merits of benefits there might be.

The blogger seems to be aiming target at NeHTA, as he has failed to recognise the challenges of being handed a poisoned chalice. Having been involved a little at NeHTA, it was easy to see that while every effort is being made to define pragmatic Australian standards for e-health information systems, numerous other parties will directly influence the likelihood of success. One instance that springs to mind was NeHTA had developed a simple directory service to identify nodes on the network. It was put forward as an Australian standard, but one vendor who had a hugely complex and excessively featured commercial non-standard product, vetoed the standard, forcing the market place to use it.

When the interests of individual stakeholders trumps the benefits to the health industry, which by it's very nature is expected to be humanitarian and altruistic, you have to question the probability of success.

By no means to I think NeHTA is exceeding expectations; I think as a quasi-government organisation there is a lack of commercial awareness, a work pace that would make chess players fall asleep, and an immaturity of project management, but I don't think this is any different from most organisations, and they recognise the importance of being pragmatic with the suggested implementations. If a vendor already has a product out, or has some of the features, they won't be penalised by the standards, more the level of conformance will be established.

Dr More also seems unaware that as well as defining technical implementations, operational standards are also being defined to ensure the technical implementations are not compromised by poor work practices. Certainly, some areas in NeHTA (although I can't speak for all) recognise that no matter how well the system is designed, if the configuration, operational practices, support processes and policies are weak, the technical systems will be vulnerable.

But hey, I haven't read any suggestions on his blog as to what should happen.