“Labor has left a complex, expensive mess behind and this is not an easy overnight fix”: Sussan Ley. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
The Abbott government will spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to salvage a Labor’s electronic health scheme that has been branded an irredeemable failure.
Five hundred days after receiving a review into the e-health system – a scheme that has already cost taxpayers $1 billion over the last five years – the coalition still has not publicly announced whether it intends to save it or axe it.
But Fairfax Media has learnt the government has decided to try to save the system and will make the announcement in the May 12 budget. The rescue package is set to cost hundreds of millions of dollars over the next four years.
Labor announced the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record system in 2010, pledging to get it up and running within two years at a cost of less than $500 million. The scheme allows patients to opt in to a personal electronic record of their medical history.
However, five years later, the cost has more than doubled and less than 10 per cent of Australians have signed up – a little over 2 million people. And only a few hundred of the country’s 1300 hospitals are on board.
Former health minister Peter Dutton was a critic of the scheme and ordered a review shortly after the Abbott government won power. The review delivered its report in December 2013, recommending a raft of changes – including that it be made an opt-out scheme, rather than opt-in.
Mr Dutton has never responded to the report, effectively leaving the scheme in a costly limbo.
New Health Minister Sussan Ley still isn’t publicly saying what the future holds.
“Labor has left a complex, expensive mess behind and this is not an easy overnight fix,” she said this week. “But we’re continuing to put time and effort into getting the right outcome for all involved.”
But with current funding due to run out in June, the government has been under pressure to find a solution. The May 12 budget will reaffirm the government’s commitment to e-health and may also announce the shift to opt out.
The government’s also looking at how to make the system more user-friendly for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and patients.
It decided to proceed with the program partly because even scrapping it would cost many millions of dollars. That’s because the government is legally obligated to continue to provide e-health records and store them for up to 130 years.
Steve Hambleton, the former Australian Medical Association president who now chairs the National E-Health Transition Authority, admits the rollout of the scheme could have been more efficient but believes it’s worth saving.
“The foundations are in the ground. We’re ready to go, we just need to raise the building and then tell people it’s there and how it can benefit them,” he said.
Labor’s health spokeswoman, Catherine King, said the 500-day delay was typical of the “chaos and dysfunction that characterises this government’s health policy”.
She stands by the e-health scheme, saying it could save the health system $7 billion a year by cutting the diagnosis, treatment and prescription errors that lead to thousands of unnecessary hospital admissions.
But University of Western Australia software expert David Glance believes the government should cut its losses and scrap the whole thing.
“It’s a $200 million-a-year white elephant that is doing nobody any good,” he says. The system is “fundamentally flawed” and “irredeemable” even with a vast new investment, he added.