Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Commonwealth Health Department Secretary Insults Health IT Professionals!

Sometimes you really have to wonder just who some people think they are!

E-health is on its way

Karen Dearne | October 28, 2008

HEALTH Department secretary Jane Halton says work on basic e-health standards is nearing completion.

Ms Halton told a Senate Estimates committee that the "nerd-relevant things which the public do not have any interest in but which are needed to make the system workable" were now getting "pretty close".

The Health Department was working towards the first version of a universal health record, which would be available in the short to mid-term.

See rest of the short article here:

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24561094-15306,00.html

These comments are just outrageous and show a total lack of insight into, and a pretty much total ignorance of, e-Health. The work is nowhere near done and if she does not know that she is not fit to hold here present position in my view.

I don’t see why any senior bureaucrat thinks it is OK to describe Health IT professionals as nerds.

This is really very sad and bodes ill for any progress in the sector with leadership of this appalling quality.

David.

Note: the Australian IT website has now been updated - and the insults to those working in the Health IT field as 'nerds and propeller heads' just keep coming.

A serious pox on her ignorant house!

D.


8 comments:

Trevor3130 said...

It's not just Jane Halton, David, it seems from the transcript (Estimates, Oct 22) she was just playing along with the crowd.
Senator BOYCE—Yes, I was struggling a bit for another word. No-one seemed terribly excited by the idea, except at a very basic level, from what I could understand.
Ms Halton—Yes. It is probably important to understand that there are a whole series of things that you have to do to realise the whole e-health vision, and some of those are about putting in place basic infrastructure. There are things that we all know about, such as broadband and having computers on desks — the things that we understand as people who operate in the day-to-day environment. Then there are things which probably are not very well understood. I think I mentioned propeller heads earlier today. This is kind of the arch propeller head — real nerd city.
Senator BOYCE—The databases.
Ms Halton—Revenge of the Nerds! People worry about standards; interoperability; issues in relation to nomenclature, in other words, making sure when we describe a ‘right leg’ everyone is talking about the same thing; catalogues of medicine; and I could go on and on. Having got all of those things, what you need is the software and the ability to uniquely identify individuals—so Senator Sue Boyce is Senator Sue Boyce and nobody else—and we need to be able to identify practitioners and locations. When you have all of those basic components, then you can build a very large e-health capability, but what you do, even if you have those components, is start on some basic things—what software do you have on the practitioner’s desk that enables them to record, for every patient they have, basic information: name, date of birth, height, weight et cetera?
Senator BOYCE—But, as you said, this initiative did start some years ago.
Ms Halton—Yes.
Senator BOYCE—So I am trying to get a sense of whether we have gone anywhere.
Ms Halton—Yes, we have. We had a program that did that infrastructure thing — the broadband et cetera — and that went incredibly well. People connected, both doctors and pharmacists. What NEHTA has been doing is building the infrastructure—those nerd-relevant things which the public do not have any interest in, and nor
should they — but you need to make the system workable.
Senator BOYCE—But people would have an appreciation of it through their own businesses et cetera.
Ms Halton—Some, not all. But that work is — and I touch wood when I say this — actually nearing completion. We have done incredibly well. There is still some way to go on this, but it is pretty close.

Someone should have asked about progress on identifiers, but I cannot see that. Maybe they do not want to know, and somehow that was signalled to the bureaucrats.
It takes a certain kind of high-handed arrogance to flip off about "propeller heads" in that setting. Perhaps this is due to frustration at having advancement cut short by change of government.

Anonymous said...

The lady is a bureaucrat. She has been in the position as Secretary of the Department of Health & Ageing for many years. She led her previous Minister astray in no uncertain manner. She will do the same to her current Minister - not intentionally mind you - just sheer and absolute ignorance and stupidity is all she needs and plenty of that she certainly has. There is a very faint glimmer of hope that her Minister can see through her Secretary's incompetence when it comes to her understanding (or lack of) around healthIT. If so, the Minister might try to get some alternate advice from outside the ivory tower of navel gazing bureaucrats.

Anonymous said...

Actually David, these days being called a 'nerd' is quite a compliment, it seems. Anyways, I'd druther be a nerd than a bureaucrat! She's just jealous..

Anonymous said...

Surely the Estimates Committee wouldn't have let that one go through to the keeper - surely they insisted on some real clarification of what "pretty close" meant - How many months?.

....... available in the short to mid-term? What does that mean in timelines? Is that months or years? How many?

Anonymous said...

Ms Halton said "The Health Department was working towards the first version of a universal health record" !!!!!!!!!! The first version !!!!!

How much money has been spent so far?

What has been delivered to-date?

Anonymous said...

On another topic Ms Halton said:

Ms Halton— That is absolutely my point. Yours are the best, but regrettably someone else thinks theirs are the best, and you just have this absolute standoff about definitions. We are doing this in the e-health environment as well, and I actually recently said to a group of—and I am allowed to say this, with an apology—propeller heads—

Senator BOYCE—A group of?

Ms Halton—Propeller heads, the people who are down in the details.

Given that Ms Halton apologised earlier for her use of the terms 'nerds' and 'propeller heads' anyone who feels slighted should forgive her.

Anonymous said...

Its quite reassuring to see our taxes at work.

Senator CORMANN—Just quickly, I think these are different things. Whether it is a better orange is one
thing, but it is still an orange. Whether it is a good or bad orange, it is still an orange. Now, surely a bed is a
bed. How hard is it to define—

Ms Halton—It is no different. A mandarine or a clementine may be an orange, but are they a bed? Is a chair
a bed? Is a bed a bed? It is exactly the same issue.

Senator CORMANN—But a chair is not a bed. The bed is a bed. A chair is not a bed. And that is my point.
The reality is that you are making this comparison with oranges, and I can see an orange can be a good orange
or a bad orange, but it is still an orange. If somebody asks the question ‘how many beds are there?’ it ought to
be pretty straightforward: ‘That’s a bed. That’s not a bed; that’s a chair.’

......... now, David, on another note, should we be confident about leaving ehealth to their imaginations?

Dr David G More MB PhD said...

I have no confidence at all after her remarks. Simple as that!

David