Row errupts over health records claims

THE Government has been accused by Labour of ‘‘attempting to rewrite history’’ by refusing to acknowledge its inability to deliver a flagship improvement to the health service.

Health Minister Jonathan Coleman has put a project to deliver electronic health records back on the agenda after missing a target to do that by 2014.

Labour’s acting health spokesman, David Clark, said the project still appeared to be at an early stage, with consultant Deloitte having just supplied a report setting out the benefits.

The Ministry of Health’s National Health IT Board director, Graeme Osborne, said: ‘‘The Government did not set a target for electronic health records in 2014.’’

That appeared at odds with a letter sent by the ministry to Paul Hutchison, chairman of Parliament’s health select committee on November 8, 2013.

The letter, which was signed by Osborne and National Health IT Board chairman Murray Milner, said the board was ‘‘delivering on two government policy commitments’’, one of which it said was ‘‘to deliver an electronic health record for every person by 2014’’.

Clark said the ministry’s claim there had been no 2014 target was unacceptable. ‘‘In late 2013, The National Health IT Board were smugly claiming they were delivering on the government policy commitment to establish an electronic health record for every person by 2014.

‘‘Now in 2015, they have the barefaced cheek to pretend a commitment was never made,’’ he said.

Clark said the Government should apologise to the public, as ministers had following the Novopay payroll debacle.

The National Health IT Board needed to state how much had been spent on the project to date ‘‘with seemingly nothing to show for it’’, he said.

Osborne said there was national commitment’’ to an health record in 2014.

‘‘The letter said ‘electronic health records’, it doesn’t say ‘national electronic health records’,’’ he said, referring to the letter sent to the select committee. ‘‘What that letter was referring to is that GPs were opening up with patient portals to the information they had in their local practice.

‘‘I am the leader of this whole programme – I wrote the plan – we never signed up to a national electronic health record.’’

Osborne refused to say what had been spent on the Deloitte study, saying that was ‘‘commercially sensitive’’. ‘‘The Government gets reports all the time by these sorts of organisations.’’ ‘‘no electronic

National Health IT Board director Graeme Osborne is ‘‘disappointed’’ by what he described as attempts to pick holes in two strategies that build on each other.