Senator Conroy spruiking the NBN’s “much-vaunted benefits to telemedicine” (‘Beware the political risks of overblown expectation’, 22/12) indeed sounds like that perfect Christmas ham. Yummee, too good to ignore!
But, let’s step down into the heat of the kitchen. In NSW, the job of the Chief Information Officer was to consolidate over one hundred disparate IT systems across that State. For instance, there were (are?) fifty different payroll systems. Sure, some doctors would love to practice their crafts remotely via a telemedicine hook-up, but they will get very irritated if they don’t get paid, as happened in QLD.
So, in asking about the status of the national IT plan, and its’ prospects for the future of health care, we need to know what is happening to core IT systems in NSW. Their CIO, Emmanuel Rodriguez, has announced he is moving on. Perhaps he has given a confidential briefing to Nicola Roxon.
It’s a mistake to piggy-back the national Health IT reforms onto the NBN without taking account of necessary rationalisations of State IT systems.
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