Since the PCEHR Bills were passed in the lower house in late February, consumer advocates have turned to a joint parliamentary inquiry into Cyber-Safety for Seniors as a venue for unresolved concerns over the program.
Last week, Health's chief information officer, Paul Madden, conceded the PCEHR system will be vulnerable to attack from fraudsters at the user's end.
Coalition senators have called for a year's delay in launching the national patient record-sharing system, due to start on July 1.
A Senate inquiry into the PCEHR Bills, management of the project and readiness for launch found general support for a system, but identified "particular aspects" that may need further amendment before implementation, including a key issue around governance arrangements.
Nevertheless, the Labor majority report recommended pushing on with plans.
Liberal senator Sue Boyce has said the PCEHR faces a delay in any event, as the government did not present the legislation in the last session and the earliest it can now be debated is the week of May 8-10 -- "just seven weeks before the program is due to start".
Bizarrely, the proposed PCEHR rules and regulations were released by the Health department the day after the Senate inquiry ended -- despite the frustration expressed by many that it was impossible to comment on the proposed legal framework when the operational details were not available.
Meanwhile, a long list of technical, security and organisational flaws mean the PCEHR is looking like an e-health pub with no beer.
This won't come as a surprise to many close to the project.
And the government has been warned -- not least by Rhonda Jolly, an analyst with the Parliamentary Library's social policy section.
In a Bills Digest, Dr Jolly says "there continues to be uncertainty surrounding how the privacy applications and administrative and technical machinery of the PCEHR system will affect those who provide it, those who consume it, and those who monitor it".
"As such, the potential for the system to improve health outcomes -- a claim which is rarely questioned -- has become almost a secondary consideration in discussions of the PCEHR."
Dr Jolly notes that it might have been a good idea "to have provided a companion document detailing the proposed rules and regulations, given that sensitive information relating to all Australians is the ultimate focus of the legislation".
"Concerns about how the technical aspects of the system will function, and, indeed, whether they will actually function, have been raised in submissions (on the legislation)," she says.
"These represent a bottom line in terms of whether Australia has taken the right approach to e-health records."
Dr Jolly goes further: "Concerns have been raised by the medical software industry about the overall design of the PCEHR system, and consumers and medical professionals have also expressed disquiet about certain aspects.
"There have been complaints from industry ranging from accusations of ineffective oversight and failure of administrators to acknowledge design flaws, to warnings that the system will not succeed because its implementation has been ill considered and rushed.
"Disquiet over the role of the system operator (the secretary of the Health department) may have been dispelled if time were available to establish a specific body for this purpose before the system is implemented."
Oddly, Dr Jolly's digest seems to have had little circulation since it was published in February, and that's clearly a pity.
This writer only came across it by chance a week ago, and it appears to have flown under the radar of most parties contributing to the present debate.
Yet Dr Jolly's research paper, The e-health revolution -- easier said than done, released last November, has been widely hailed as a masterful summation of just exactly how Australia has come to arrive at the e-health pub with no beer.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 04.04.2012
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