Opposition health spokesman Mark McArdle has obtained 3120 pages of emails, strategies, plans and minutes generated about the eMR tender between June 2009 and April this year under state Right To Information laws.
Another 942 pages were not released due to being either "cabinet or commercial in confidence".
Mr McArdle claims the documents show senior departmental officers asked research firm Gartner to make changes to its independent report on a market scanning exercise in 2009.
He has asked the Queensland Auditor-General to "conduct a full audit of the health IT program to ensure future patient care is not placed at risk and taxpayers' funds are not wasted".
Mr McArdle is concerned that the process may have unfairly prevented potential competitors from bidding.
"The most surprising response to the whole debacle has been Health Minister Geoff Wilson condoning the behaviour of his department," he said.
"My fear is that by ignoring the issue, the Bligh government will put patients' lives at risk by purchasing a poor platform for medical records."
Mr McArdle said the $220m to be spent fixing the state's health payroll system was "one of the worst administrative failures in Queensland's history, and Labor seems eager to repeat the same mistakes".
Mr Wilson responded by telling The Australian: "This just shows what a joke of an outfit the LNP (opposition) is. They speak first and then find out the facts."
Mr Wilson said the Auditor-General had reviewed the governance of the e-health program some months ago, "and it produced an advice to government which found no issues".
According to a ministerial adviser, an independent expert from probity advisers Room to Run reviewed the probity of the eMR request and reported: "There is no reason to believe Cerner has been treated with undue bias in any of the processes, communications or stages."
Mr Wilson said the Auditor-General's office was maintaining "a watching brief" on the eMR project to determine "whether there were any issues for it to consider, and to date it has not seen fit to raise any".
Queensland Health's chief information officer, Ray Brown, said it was "categorically untrue to claim any bias" in the process.
"Our frontline staff and key users felt very strongly that we should use the same system that was implemented in NSW and Victoria," he said. "Queensland is now finalising contractual arrangeents (with Cerner)."
Mr Brown said the respected e-health program director, Tam Shepherd, resigned from the department last week to take on "a newly created role as chief executive in the primary health sector".
"Tam is leaving us on very good terms," he said.
The released documents show Gartner was asked to establish "which international vendors have actual, longitudinal implementations of eMR capabilities across multiple campuses, using an integrated approach".
The firm was also asked to determine which vendors have "a (Gartner's computer-based patient record capabilities rating) Gen Three or Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society scale of five and above in terms of a working eMR that is scalable across geographically dispersed sites".
The draft report was received at about 4pm on October 26, 2009, and by 7.30pm a department official was emailing colleagues to say he had "had the teleconference call with the Gartner author and have requested (and Gartner has agreed) to make several minor changes".
These modifications were intended to "more clearly present the current status in Australia".
"In particular, I have asked that the table on page 2 be amended to reflect: 1. A column noting CPR Gen 3 installations in Australia and not vendor product in Australia -- only Cerner will be reflected as having a CPR Gen 3 in Australia," the email says.
"2. Unambiguous clarification that (iSoft's) Lorenzo and i.Clinical Management application are not Gen 3 CPR and the removal of iCM from the table.
"In addition, I have asked for a minor change to bullet 1 of the Conclusions section. This is to reflect clearly that only Cerner has both proven Gen 3 eMR installations in Australia as well as having a Gen 3 CPR product."
The documents do not indicate another vendor was considered as a viable candidate.
The eMR is intended to replace the long obsolete Hospital Based Corporate Information System that was originally installed in 1992.
iSoft, now a CSC-owned company, has held a maintenance contract for HBCIS for some years but will cease support operations in 2015.
The road to a new clinical system began in 2006-07, when Queensland adopted an e-health strategy and allocated $243.6m for capital investment over four years.
It appears Queensland Health decided to opt for the system selected by NSW Health for its often troubled patient records program, now under review by the O'Farrell government.
Earlier this year, Jon Patrick, a professor at the University of Sydney, highlighted safety concerns over Cerner's FirstNet software used in hospital emergency departments.
Victoria's rollout of a Cerner system also ran into trouble. In 2008, the Auditor-General's office found the HealthSmart team had failed to get the system working at any site and had blown out on costs and delivery.
Cerner, which routinely declines to comment on matters in the media, was not answering the phone yesterday.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 27.09.2011
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