CONFIDENCE in the government’s troubled $1 billion e-health record is under further question after a GP found the system was identifying his job as a “meat inspector”.
Former AMA president Dr Mukesh Haikerwal who helped the government design the system before resigning in despair said it was the latest evidence the system wasn’t working.
“If the system is allowed to get roles so wrong, how do we know what it is doing to our health information?” he asks.
Australian Medical Association GP spokesman Dr Brian Morton said he too was disheartened when he tried to access a patient’s e-health record recently.
“I went to upload information on the shared health summary and it said there was no space to put a record,” he said.
The e-health record only has space for 1,000 files but is easily clogged because it records every medical visit and Medicare claim made by the patient.
This sick patient who has renal disease and has frequent visits to hospital had 1,047 document on her record, he said.
“There should be clinical information on the record not all these useless Medicare interactions,” he said.
The Department of Health said the “meat inspector” classification was “a known issue with a 3rd party software vendor product that connects to the PCEHR system”.
“The software vendor has advised that this issue has been fixed within their product.” the Health Department spokeswoman said.
The system operator has notified the small number of affected healthcare providers of the issue, and provided advice on rectifying the incorrect tagging on PCEHR documents that had already been created, the spokeswoman said.
Fewer than one in ten Australians (2.1 million people) currently has an e-health record even though they were launched in 2012.
And doctors have uploaded just 41,998 shared health summaries onto these records, which means most of the more than 2 million e-health records are empty.
The scheme has so far cost taxpayers more than $1 billion to develop, or almost $24,000 per shared health summary.
Launched by the previous Labor Government in July 2012, the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record was meant to bring medical records into the digital age and contain an electronic patient health summary, a list of allergies and medications and eventually X-rays and test results.
The Abbott Government commissioned a review of the system just after winning office, but has failed to respond to its recommendations for more than 14 months.
The review called for the system to switch from an opt in to an opt out model to speed up the toll out.
If the $1 billion spent so far is to be salvaged and the scheme fully rolled out the government needs to provide direction and funding by June 30.
Source: news.com.au