Myhealthns disappearing into digital ether

Back in August, the Nova Scotia Health Department announced that, “Myhealthns, the province’s secure online service that allows patients to access their health information and securely communicate with their doctor, is moving to a new software vendor.”

The department didn’t say Myhealthns “might be” moving to a new vendor, or “could be” moving to a new vendor. They said it “is” moving to a new software vendor.

Well, as it turns out, there’s no new software vendor, and the department announced last week that, by the end of March, Myhealthns will disappear into the digital ether.

“Patients will be receiving instructions on how to download their data. They will also receive a number of reminders about the March 31 deadline,” the department promised. “The final day for access to the Myhealthns system for health-care providers will be March 27. For patients, access will continue until March 31.”

Users have been assured that after March 31, their data on Myhealthns will be securely and permanently destroyed by the vendor. The department will get something ominously labelled a “certificate of destruction,” as proof of that happening.

Six months ago, when he announced that Mckesson Canada, the Myhealthns software provider, wouldn’t be renewing its contract with the province, Health Minister Randy Delorey assumed an air of supreme confidence about the future of the digital service.

“We are putting a plan in place with Mckesson Canada and are actively working towards a new software solution, that will minimize the impact to patients and providers,” Delorey said in that August news release.

Apparently, the plan they were putting in place wasn’t a good one. Last week, when the minister announced the demise of Myhealthns, there was no mention of a “new software solution” and the impact on Myhealthns users – some 30,000 patients and 300 doctors – is found in the instructions they’re getting on how to salvage the data they need.

Between August, when doctors and patients on Myhealthns were told there was nothing to worry about because the Health Department had this, and last week when the same department fessed up that they don’t have this, there was zero communication between the department and Myhealthns users.

The end of Myhealthns is an inconvenience and may worry some of the 30,000 patients who used the system. It’s likely a bigger inconvenience for the 300 doctors who signed on. Both need to do stuff to capture the information they need from the software, but beyond that the damage appears to be limited.

A much bigger, costlier and more comprehensive digital health initiative the province has in the works, called One Patient One Record (OPOR), has been beset by troubling questions, and those questions have drawn responses of a kind with the August “nothing to worry about here” release from the Health Department.

When there were signs of trouble with Myhealthns – Mckesson was ending its contract – the government glossed over the problem with vague assurances that everything was all right – we have a plan.

The province responds to questions about the OPOR procurement with its own version of, “it was a perfect phone call.” They claim they ran a perfect procurement process.

That perfect process reduced the field of potential vendors for OPOR – which comes with a price tag running well into the hundreds of millions of dollars – to two, based entirely on information provided by the vendors themselves. No references were checked before the field was winnowed to the digital-health giants, Cerner and Allscripts.

Questions about the prior relationship between key players at the Nova Scotia Health Authority and the finalists were swept aside, never addressed, and the tracks on the NSHA website that led to that cosy relationship were covered. Concerns raised about the fairness of the process by another potential vendor drew a menacing letter from a government lawyer.

Just like it had a plan for Myhealthns, the government has a plan for OPOR. Why isn’t that more comforting?

The Health Minister now says that through Myhealthns the government learned that Nova Scotians value the use of online tools to access their health information.

For the sake of the taxpayers that the province will put on the hook for a big, ninefigure OPOR contract, let’s hope they’ve learned more than that.