Digital diligence paramount in developing electronic medical records
When a government decides to spend millions on a complicated new piece of software, you’d hope they’d have procedures in place to manage that implementation.
After all, these systems can cost hundreds of millions, and if they’re poorly managed, it can cost a bundle more to fix anything that goes wrong. You don’t have to look much farther than the federal government’s Phoenix payroll system for an example of how bad things can get.
So it’s with some trepidation that we regard the province’s One Person One Record program, OPOR for short, which would provide our health-care system with a single electronic record for each of us, containing all of our health information in one document that any health-care worker can access when treating us.
The benefits are obvious, especially when many Nova Scotians are being treated at clinics by unfamiliar doctors because they don’t have a family physician to consult. But other jurisdictions have run into problems with electronic health record systems.
As detailed in Monday’s paper by the Chronicle Herald’s Paul Schneidereit, authorities in Australia, B.C., and closer to home, in P.E.I., have had to deal with ballooning costs, poor integration with existing systems, lack of consultation with health workers and health authority mismanagement.
An OPOR system in Queensland, Australia, for instance, was criticized by that state’s auditor general for poor cost estimates and a failure to consult with local health workers. The cost, originally estimated at over C$500 million, has doubled.
The price of a similar project on Vancouver Island has risen from $173 million to at least $228 million. P.E.I.’s auditor general says that province bungled an implementation that also wound up costing double original estimates.
No doubt, other jurisdictions have had fewer problems. But there is good reason for Nova Scotians to worry.
Earlier this year, Nova Scotia information commissioner Catherine Tully harshly criticized the province for its lax practices surrounding IT implementation. She said a serious breach of privacy was caused by a “failure of due diligence in the selection and deployment of a new technology tool by the department.” Auditor general Michael Pickup said the province should “conduct comprehensive risk assessments for IT projects prior to implementation.”
Well, OPOR is certainly a new technology tool. It will clearly involve sensitive private information, and it will require as comprehensive a risk assessment as is humanly possible.
The province says it is going ahead with OPOR, despite the questions raised in these pages late last year over the fairness of the tender process surrounding it. We can only hope that the bureaucrats in charge are aware of these pitfalls and are taking steps to avoid them.