This appeared just a few days ago:
3 November 2017
First the rugby, now national e-health records
What is it about small countries that are cold, wind beaten, have highlands, and lots of woolly hooved livestock? Both New Zealand and Scotland punch well above their weight in sport, especially rugby. And both do the same in digital health.
If you�d like a few answers to the digital health side of this strange cultural phenomenon Dr Libby Morris, clinical lead on Scotland�s SPIRE program, the pragmatic and so far successful equivalent to our My Health Record saga, might have a few. Dr Morris is the keynote speaker at next week�s annual summit of the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA) being held in Melbourne.
To offer appropriate contrast, Tim Kelsey, and others from the Australian Digital Health Agency, will be there as well, spruiking the �Australian way�. It will be worthwhile seeing the two countries head to head. The approaches of both are a long way apart, and most commentators have Scotland a long way in the lead, despite starting five years after us.
SPIRE stands for Scottish Primary Care Information Resource. If you�re a GP you�ve got to love the name from the outset � it�s putting primary care at the centre of things up front, where it probably should be. Some would argue that My Health Record is better because it�s patient centric. And that�s where you start to see how Scotland may have got things right and we may have missed the mark somewhat.
Patients don�t care about their EMR and they have no idea why a form of EMR for all citizens might be a good thing. GPs do. Patients and EMRs are the centre of their world. So why not start with them at the centre and work outwards? Scotland seems to have done just that. Get the main professionals engaged first and go outwards to their patients and make sure the stakeholders are in the boat before you start rowing further out to sea.
Much better still, at no point did the SPIRE program ever get close to contemplating a �boil the ocean� approach, which is the path we�ve taken with the MyHR.
Lots more here:
The lesson out of all this is very clear. Don�t push a system that almost no-one wants to use rather than supporting the clinicians and their patient to work optimally together supported by information they both know and care about.
The rest of the Digital Health infrastructure is best optimized by the Government to support the clinician and the patient NOT some data mining and analytic objective of the Government.
The rest of the article just emphasizes how misguided many of the components of the ADHA Digital Health Strategy are and how badly it seems to be being executed and communicated so far.
The positive wrap for the MSIA (Medical Software Industry Association) and its centrality in all this is both true and important. The more time passes, on the other hand, the less aligned with what matters the ADHA seems. Go the smaller and apparently much smarter countries!
Comments welcome!
David.
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