I have been following this story for some time – I just can’t believe that there is not wider coverage of the flagrant waste of hundreds of millions of dollars for NO OUTCOME. The tragedy just seems to be never-ending, although for the service providers, such as Oracle and Accenture, it must be like living in Paradise.
There is an important story in The Australian today (buried in the IT section) on blow out of some $300 million on Labor’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record program – don’t you just love the name, no privacy concerns here (just complete and total bureacratic incompetence) – from an original budget of $467 million.
What I can’t understand is how there can be such a large additional appropriation and how come there is not much more scutiny of what is going on. With the energy of a small number of journalists, we found out about the waste and studipity of much of the BER spending, leading to the government commissioning an independent report, the final version of which was actually quite scathing. (The first version was very political and had all the impact of wet lettuce.)
We need to see the same process started with the extravagance and waste of all e-health spending.
Is that like the Emergency Medical Hologram?
C.L.
28 Feb 12 at 4:00 pm
Hey, aren’t we building a $50bn NBN so that someone living in Upper Blackbutt can get medical advice over the net?
Gosh, I’m starting to think it might not work.
Infidel Tiger
28 Feb 12 at 4:06 pm
E health records were always going to be a debacle. Hundreds and thousands of providers, the vast bulk of whom operate as boutique or cottage industries, plus big entities such as hospitals, all with varying legacy systems.
Lloyd
28 Feb 12 at 4:11 pm
Help me out here.
Am I to understand the Gillard government has bungled something on an epic scale?
C.L.
28 Feb 12 at 4:14 pm
A close friend was responsible for installing ehealth in an entire Asian country’s hospital system…in the 90s. He has watched and laughed for the past decade as Australia has spent more than it cost to install and operate his system…for no result whatsoever.
Just like MyKi and any other major IT-related project.
Highlights the utter absence of contracting and implementation skills in our public sector.
And the NSW PSA has the hide to describe the Schott reports as finding “alleged inefficiency”!
Jasbo
28 Feb 12 at 4:28 pm
“We need to see the same process started with the extravagance and waste of all e-health spending.”
So we need to spend more money to find out how much money we are wasting? Maybe we need a new government.
kelly liddle
28 Feb 12 at 4:45 pm
The problem with their model is its arse backwards …. the records must be mine to allow me to decide who views them, not the other way around.
We have a system running already which is patient based (not bureaucracy based) and Doctors who access it want to know why it’s not every where?
Aussieute
28 Feb 12 at 5:45 pm
I wouldn’t trust the bastards to fit a party hat.
Ooh Honey Honey
28 Feb 12 at 5:52 pm
They give the car industry a few hundred million and the IT industry a coupla. Just more stimulus.
Anyone know what the tally is for the Qld pay debacle?
Pickles
28 Feb 12 at 10:03 pm
Pickles, I can’t tell you what the tab is for Qld, but the problems are continuing. The other thing is that the NSW Health mob bought the same software package, and all that shit is now breaking out in NSW.
One nurse got paid her payroll number – $87k for a week. Lots of other stuff ups as well.
“A management team is the only form of life with ten bellies and no brain.” Robert Heinlein.
Winston Smith
28 Feb 12 at 10:54 pm
@pickles I personally know people who are still working on trying to fix the Qld pay debacle. Top dollar rates and going on 12 months and still plenty to go.
The big ticket item that the news hasn’t really revealed is that all the people who were overpaid (some were underpaid, some overpaid) now owe QLD health big bucks – we’re talking millions. However, because employees can’t be relied upon to not spend their overpay, QLD health can’t ask for lump sums back. So the overpaid employees will go on a payment plan to repay the money that wasn’t theirs in the first place. So this thing will run for years. Best interest free loan one could hope for, I guess.
It beats me why anyone in government thinks they can implement an IT project properly. To get good IT outcomes, you need top people right from the beginning. Top people don’t work for the government IT department, they work for top IT organisations. So the government employ 3rd rate people either directly, or through consulting firms who hire C level programmers and then charge $1000 a day for them.
Implementing complex IT systems can be done- Google does it every other day. But you’ve got to attract top talent – A Players – and pay them well.
IT projects aren’t one of those things where you can thrown manpower at it – when you start doing that, things go off the rails even faster.
The government should just stop trying to customise IT packages. It would be far cheaper and easier in the long run to customise the way they work to the software than the other way around. They just don’t have the talent to get it done. The government doesn’t mess about trying to design it’s own bridges – it’s all contracted out properly. Why they think they can design their own IT systems I’ll never know.
brc
28 Feb 12 at 11:28 pm
Interesting, brc.
I looked at the NEHTA website. They have 11 board members (including that Gonski fellow) most of whom appear to be administrators. Then they have “Clinical Leaders”, 63 of them – doctors, pharmacists, nurses, practice managers and an obligatory consumer group capturee or two.
They’ve probably been spending all that money on organising meetings and follow up meetings and clarification meetings and reviews of meetings; a bit like AHPRA really.
jrm
28 Feb 12 at 11:51 pm
Great post, brc. Software development is very opaque. It’s hard for a non-expert to look in and get an accurate idea of the state of a software project in development. (They can look at user interfaces, but those are only a tiny part of the picture.) That means that very long, very slow train crashes are common.
I haven’t been following the Qld Health story, but no doubt they have built some ridiculous Rube Goldberg contraption. If it were a physical device, people could look at it and see the duct tape and pieces of string, and think, “Who are these clowns?”
Because of it’s opacity, the software industry is a safe haven for a lot of incompetent people. In my opinion the competence level of the average developer is very low.
Like you say, brc, if the government has no way of telling who is competent and who isn’t, then any software development project they start will turn out badly.
Dangph
29 Feb 12 at 10:42 am
I’ve just started working for the first time in government IT.
It’s amazing. The inefficiency is staggering. This example is big but there are quite a few projects for tens of millions of dollars that are a total wasteful disasters.
It could surely be done massively better. There are projects, almost skunkworks style, that do work and are really quite impressive but the big projects seem to regularly be incredibly awful.
Companies like Accenture, IBM, MS, Oracle and others clearly make masses out of government being hopeless.
Karl Kessel
29 Feb 12 at 7:07 pm
Karl, gubbermint hired you? But why? If you spouted that line in an interview, you’d never have been hired. Unless per chance you actually have any constructive ideas??
If so, care to share?
Kelly of Kenmore
29 Feb 12 at 7:13 pm