BC Opt Out News
October 20, 2009: Governments Change Direction on Health E-Records GOOGLE, Microsoft and other new providers will host Australians’ electronic health records as the federal and state governments back away from funding a nationwide scheme. National E-Health Transition Authority chief executive Peter Fleming said the original vision of a single e-health record system had been abandoned in favour of “person-controlled” records that could be adopted more quickly. The Council of Australian Governments is yet to make a decision on the business case for individual e-health records put to it by NEHTA a year ago, but Mr Fleming said the health ministers were pushing the organisation to take “a far more commercial approach”. “Five years ago, there was a strong view that there would be an e-health record for all Australians held on a massive database somewhere,” he told the Medical Software Industry Association conference in Sydney last week. “That’s no longer the view. “When and if the e-health record is approved, we’ll enter into detailed planning around the architecture, but undoubtedly people will have an option to choose health records from a range of sources and their medical information will be stored in a number of locations.” Mr Fleming said the foundation work on healthcare identifiers, secure messaging and other technical standards would support a rollout of personal health records by 2012, although a new indexing service would be needed to bring disparate files together at the point of care. To cater for emergency situations, a health summary containing key medication and allergy data could be linked to the index. “Certainly there needs to be a viable financial model for the private sector, in terms of margins or incentives, but I would see those things occurring,” Mr Fleming said. “One of our directions now is how we engage the private sector and move these things forward.” NEHTA has released to public discussion its strategic plan for the next three years to 2012. [Source] CA – OSCAR Shows Electronic Health System Doable Doctors behind two made-in-Canada electronic record systems designed years ago and adopted around the world insist that electronic medical records systems need not be hard to deploy. OSCAR, an open-source software pioneered by McMaster University’s school of medicine, is being used by hundreds of doctors from Prince Edward Island to British Columbia, and many more from outside the country. It puts patients’ information on secure servers that are based in a doctor’s office but can be accessed online from just about anywhere by logging on the same way one would to an online bank account. A separate sister system, MyOSCAR, lets patients access their own records online. David Chan, the system’s architect and a professor with McMaster’s family medicine department, has given talks about electronic medical records across Canada and the United States, and says he doesn’t understand why provincial governments haven’t jumped to adopt OSCAR’s technology. “The impression of our current government agencies such as eHealth is that open-source projects ... tend to be not as professional,” he said. “This is simply not true any more.” Because OSCAR is downloadable for free, the costs to implement it provincially would be relatively modest, he says - likely in the area of $20-million for Ontario, much of that going to vendors who would adapt the software to different doctors’ needs and explain how it works. He notes this system wouldn’t be ideal for a centralized, single-server database - but then, he argues, that would probably be a bad idea anyway: Having millions of patients’ medical information on one enormous server would be needlessly unwieldy, not to mention a privacy nightmare if its integrity were compromised.
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