Last Tuesday, following revelations in The Australian that Medicare Australia had provided the Senate inquiry on the HI bill with new details on suspected staff snooping, the document detailing data privacy breaches disappeared from the Senate Community Affairs committee website. Also missing were three National E-Health Transition Authority responses, posted the previous day, to questions on notice from the Senate inquiry.
The committee secretary said computer glitches had caused some documents to "fall off" the page for most of Tuesday.
On Monday, the Senate committee had recommended passage of the HI legislation, despite the minority Coalition members calling for amendments to ensure patient privacy and to prevent personal health identifiers being used as part of a national identity regime.
The bill is now scheduled for debate in the Senate on May 11 -- budget day -- and Health Minister Nicola Roxon has released draft regulations underpinning the legislation for public consultation until April 9.
The additional material was back on the committee's submissions page late on Tuesday, after inquiries by The Australian. Two new documents from the federal Health Department answering questions raised in the inquiry also appeared on the page. The secretary confirmed "technical difficulties" on the Department of the Senate website had resulted in some documents "not being available, at times".
Meanwhile, people trying to access the HI bill draft regulations and consultation from the Health Department website on Wednesday got an Error, Page Not Found message.
A Health spokeswoman said the department "experienced some technical difficulties late on March 16 with the Healthcare Identifiers (material as it was being) restructured to bring together all documents relevant to the public consultation" on the proposed HI rules.
"The documents had originally been published on separate pages, and the update was to make all (material) available from the one page," she said. "No changes were made to documents during the update."
"The reason for the delay was that key documents were archived during the process and had to be restored.
"The problem was rectified by around 11am on Thursday morning, and all information is available at www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/exposure-draft-regs."
The Australian has been assured by the minister's office, the Health Department and Medicare Australia that at no time was there any direction to "move, delete or amend any documents or information relating to e-health" on either website.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 23.03.2010
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