healthcare information technology

More on the travails of the UK's moribund National Programme for IT in the NHS.

It's officially gone "PffffT"...

NHS told to abandon delayed IT project
Denis Campbell, health correspondent
The Guardian, Wednesday 21 September 2011

£12.7bn computer scheme to create patient record system is to be scrapped after years of delays

From the aforementioned Huffington Post Investigative Fund article "

A theme of my writings on this blog and on my teaching site for the past decade has been mismanagement of healthcare information technology by an industry and people who have been operating for many years far beyond their qualifications and competencies.

Technology requiring the highest levels of biomedical-IT cross disciplinary expertise has most commonly been designed, managed, implemented, led and defended by amateurs [see note 1].

I have written on numerous occasions that health IT in its present form, and often poorly implemented under current leadership structures, is often a waste of precious healthcare resources that might be better spent on essentials such as patient care for the poor or improved human staffing.

As at my site on health IT difficulties and mismanagement:

As I wrote at Healthcare Renewal here, I recently posted a web petition "Transparency and Openness in Electronic Patient Records and Other Healthcare Information Technology Systems" at http://www.webpetitions.com/cgi-bin/pr

I have created a new Web petition "Transparency and Openness in Electronic Patient Records and Other Healthcare Information Technology Systems."

It is at WEBPETITIONS.COM at this link: http://www.webpetitions.com/cgi-bin/print_petition.cgi?99504454

The petition states:

In my June 7 post Open letter to Mark Leavitt, Chairman, Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology on Penalties For Use of Non-"Certified" HIT I asked CCHIT's chair pointed questions about a remarkable NJ Bill to make non-CCHIT-certified health IT forbidden for sale or use, with civil penalties, in the state of NJ.

His response is posted in the link.

A remarkable Bill (ASSEMBLY, No. 3934, STATE OF NEW JERSEY, 213th LEGISLATURE) has appeared in NJ that would prohibit the sale or use of healthcare IT not "certified" (i.e., feature-qualified) by the industry-founded and connected group "Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology" (CCHIT).

The Bill calls for monetary civil penalties for such sale or use:

Dear fellow physicians, nurses and other clinicians:

You thought frivolous medical malpractice suits were a problem?

Guess what:

It's worse.

You are now all potential victims of the computer industry's arrogance and dysfunction.

A few thoughts for a Wednesday morning: