IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Des Pearson, Auditor-General for Victoria, released a report yesterday assessing the outcome of the state's whole-of-government electronic directory initiative — Project Rosetta — concluding that delays and budget excesses related to the project are symbolic of ongoing problems in government IT.

Australian Defence Force CIO Patrick Hannan has been poached for the role of Victorian CIO. Tony Aitkenhead, former Information Services Branch executive officer at the Victorian Department of Human Services, will take up the CTO position.

State Premier John Brumby announced the plan this week, but Gartner research director Robin Simpson said he wondered how deep Labor's proposal actually went.

"Often these programs sound wonderful on the surface... you've really got to wonder whether this has been thought through," he said.

Australian Defence Force CIO Patrick Hannan has been headhunted for the role of Victorian CIO, while former Victorian Department of Human Services Information Services Branch executive officer Tony Aitkenhead has been appointed CTO.

No other state has either a CTO or a CIO.

Telehealth video conferencing and live telemetrics equipment for trauma and critical will be extended to all 16 regional Victorian hospitals administered under the Loddon Mallee Rural Health Alliance following a successful, 20-month trial across four of the units.

The initial $5.2 million trial was funded under the Federal Government’s $118.6 million Clever Networks initiative and took place from June 2008 across hospitals in Mildura, Swan Hill, Machuka and Bendigo, connected to four metropolitan hospitals in Melbourne. The trial involved the deployment of eight mobile Virtual Trauma and Critical Care Units (ViTCCU) and seven fixed units across the regional hospitals, along with software and smart vitals devices from a consortium of companies including Telstra, Cerner, KPMG and Polycom.

Patrick Hannan will commence as CIO on December 8. He will “assist the Bracks government to deliver on its e-government strategy by providing authoritative advice and strong leadership of information and communication technology matters across government,” said Marsha Thomson, Information and Communication Technology Minister

When the now-$427 million program began in 2003, it was hoped that the ICT refresh and rebuild across the state's public hospitals, rural alliances and community health providers would be complete within four years.

But in April this year, Victoria's auditor-general Des Pearson said HealthSmart had been overly ambitious in its targets, and was at least two years behind schedule.

Named after the Rosetta Stone, Project Rosetta is intended to unlock the information stored in various government applications.

The Victorian Government is to shortly progress to the third phase in its implementation of the National e-health Transition Authority’s (NeHTA) national product catalogue.

The catalogue is intended to be the source and main repository of data for public health institutions seeking to purchase medicines, medical devices and other healthcare items.

More than two years after Victoria's Human Services Directory (HSD) went live, the Department of Human Services has outlined its plans to extend the application's functionality with a new three-year contract beginning in 2008.

The original concept of a state-wide health services directory resource dates back to 2001, when it was decided it would be the most effective means of providing services information to agencies and practitioners.

Effective leadership and coordination of Government 2.0 across agencies will, as always, be a critical ingredient of success.

Manager of digital engagement for the Department of Justice Victoria, Patrick McCormick, said the public sector could not be in control when collaborating with online audiences.

“I think crowd surfing is what engagement is looking like... this is the kind of thing that’s very hard for government – to trust the community, to admit some uncertainty and to go with the flow,” he told delegates at the Effective Community Engagement conference in Sydney this week.

Victoria's Department of Health will shortly commence implementing an e-health smartcard to manage access to key Victorian public health sector (VPHS) applications via a new single sign-on portal, as part of its whole-of-health ICT strategy, HealthSMART.

The two-factor authentication system will consist of a smartcard management system card printers, contact smartcard readers, a hardware security module, middleware and mini-driver for network authentication, and an application for performing certificate and PIN management functions.

The Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) has flagged its intention to push ahead with e-health and roll out an Electronic Medical Record.

The Electronic Medical Record is being deployed in response to the Victorian Government’s $360 million whole-of-health ICT strategy aimed at modernising and replacing ICT systems throughout the state's public healthcare sector.

"Recent ICT-focused audits carried out by my office, as well as data from the Department of Treasury and Finance's Gateway Unit, clearly indicate that agencies within the Victorian public sector sometimes begin large, expensive ICT projects without a clear understanding of goals, required resources or risks," wrote auditor-general Des Pearson in the guide.

This week the state's Department of Human Services -- which is responsible for health and other community services -- called for an external consultant to develop a business case evaluating current e-referral activities in Victoria and examining the path forward towards universal use of e-referral in the state.

Established in 2003, as the "whole of ICT strategy" for Victorian health, HealthSMART is a state-wide project bringing together some 272 sites, 67,500 full-time employees, 150,000 users and 12,500 beds across the Victorian health system. The network now connects 40 wide area networks and two datacentres. Roaming desktops are employed throughout the network using a combination of the Citrix XenServer and XenApp virtual desktop software. Citrix is also used for bedside clinical systems that contain information such as an electronic drugs chart for patients.

“The iPads will allow doctors and nurses to access any web-enabled application run by their hospital as they move around the hospital, as well as allowing them to tap into health information resources,” health minister Daniel Andrews says.

The object of the Victorian eHealth Network is to assist the local industry to collaborate and exchange information in order to become leaders in the provision of innovative eHealth solutions.

The idea of the network was floated as far back as mid 2008. A working party, chaired by Liz Sonenberg of The University of Melbourne, first met on July 21, 2008.