Patience wearing thin
15 October 2008
Patience with NEHTA and the progress being made in the roll out of a national electronic health record project is starting to wear thin.
Round-table discussions throughout Brisbane, Alice Springs and Canberra revealed the thoughts of 150 clinicians and consumers, with a number of suggested solutions resulting.
A general consensus involving the timing of the project was reached with an immediate, revised rollout being the agreed upon approach. This revised model would involve the roll out of records with minimal information, including immunisations, allergies, medications, problems, organ donor status, next of kin and contact details. Therefore, sensitive information would be missing, until public confidence surrounding privacy and security issues is achieved.
In an article featured on ZDNet (15/10/08), a clinician who attended these discussions supported this proposal;
"I agree with the fact that we need to start, sort of, shallow and we need to get this out there now. The longer we wait, the more likely we are to have lots of little projects going on that are never going to talk to this project, so we need to get it out there," they said.
The participants agreed that a critical mass of people using the records would be required, including an opt-out model, where people would have to tell their practitioners if they did not want to have an electronic record.