From totally unreliable sources I have been told.
1. NeHTA have put the case to the powers that be to be restructured into the Australian E-health Agency (or whatever) thereby getting rid of the nonsensical charade that they are a Pty Ltd organisation.
(This would be in line with the Deloittes Strategy and would do wonders for accountability and governance of the whole endeavour)
2. That this may happen this side of March 2009.
If it is not true, it is a great rumour. If it is true it suggests some real work is underway to begin implementation of the National E-Health Strategy.
That would have to be a very good thing indeed in my view! Frankly, I reckon if this rumour is not true it should be!
Can any of the blogs ‘anonymous’ correspondents confirm / deny this great little piece of scuttlebutt?
David.
5 comments:
An important correction is needed first of all.
NEHTA is a public company limited by guarantee. It is not a Pty Ltd company.
Hi,
What is the difference and what does it mean to be one or the other?
David.
Does this also involve dropping the "Transition".
The following is a useful link into ASIC info regarding converting from one kind of company to another.
http://www.asic.gov.au/asic/asic.nsf/byheadline/Changing+company+type?openDocument
Changing company type is a serious step and only some kinds of conversion are allowable. The table provides a basic introduction.
If there's a shift to agency or commission status, as a matter of urgency, it can't be to do with dollars. The work to be done is massive and across several departments as well as the jurisdictions. It will be hugely expensive, so a push to start spending new money does not make sense, in itself, in this new age of extreme stringency.
No, if there is a rush it can only be because a functioning national IT backbone is being seen as a national security issue. That would make sense.
A significant paper, Converging technologies for biosecurity was released two days ago at Science Alert. It's summary of a conference held six months. DAFF has just released its commissioned report into biosecurity and the government response.
At one level, government agencies have to be able to answer questions about situations like the peanut-butter borne Salmonella outbreak in the US. The list of recalled items is long and includes many items likely to be purchased for children. Do any of these items enter Australia? That may be seen as a problem only for importers and grocery chains, but if illness due to the incriminated serotype is occurring here, how well would the candidate EHR cope with the microbiological detail required? OK, it doesn't matter much for most salmonella illnesses, but what about if the organism is a highly virulent novel strain (or even one of the old ones) of E.coli, capable of causing death and permanent organ damage? What's more, it remains contagious for weeks in some of the infected children? Wouldn't there be some expectation that "cases" could be tagged in near-real time and followed through the health system without inflicting undue prejudice?
What about a worse scenario, a malicious importation or contamination, with, say ... Salmonella? Been done before, but would the community be happy to wait for days and weeks while over-stretched reference laboratories and public health agencies labour through their reams of paperwork and fiddle with their stand-alone Access databases?
But how about an intentional introduction of a lethal virus, something along the lines of smallpox? The hue and cry would be explosive, compared to it SARS was a picnic. It's highly likely such an event would present at a hospital A&E in early clinical phase, perhaps to sit around in triage for an hour or so. What hope would there be of tracking contacts back into the community, linking into vehicle registration data and number-plate recognition surveillance, and into CCTV, CrimTrac, facial recognition and police data about known associates and haunts?
Someone well known reckoned that Health IT would only get a good boost along after a pandemic had occurred, ie, too late. It would be nice to think that at least some of the groundwork has at least been presented to parliament. Since epidemiological tracking is very intrusive, but very useful in the early phases of an epidemic (or pandemic) when early preventive efforts could be effective and mollify panic, the public would have to persuaded that the privacy issues are being handled thoughtfully. The public must have rock-solid assurance that the databases and their contents will never, ever, be subject to commercial bias.
The first step in cracking the privacy knot is to harmonise the IPPs with the NPPS.
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