Is This ED EHR harming or killing anyone in NSW?
It cannot be "not compromising patient care" on first principles.
This type of practical and ethical question seems to never get asked, while what appears to be a tit-for-tat political kerfuffle goes on.
This is due in part to the baffling special accommodations afforded worldwide towards an extremely profitable but potentially extremely dangerous medical device, as well as due to the issues I described in my post about reckless technophilia and the accompanying disregard for rights of others here.
The Register
NSW government accused of dodgy software cover-up
FirstNet: the First State's deadest duck [or "deadliest duck?" - ed.]
Posted in Business, 12th February 2012 22:00 GMT
The buggy FirstNet emergency department software has become the subject of a political argument in NSW. [What about a clinical and ethical argument? - ed.]
In one of those paradoxes of democracy, an opposition which, in government, was responsible for a now-despised implementation is now using the IT project as a stick to beat a government which was in opposition when the system was chosen.
Last week, the Sydney Morning Herald obtained a report into the system by Deloitte, under a freedom of information request. It says [1] the Deloitte report criticises FirstNet because it is:
- Is chronically under-funded;
- Produces inadequate records;
- Was unreliable in delivering messages, and did not provide alerts when messages failed to reach their destination; and
- Demanded excessive amounts of screen time from clinicians.
[But is it harming or killing anyone? Are those statistics being collected robustly and scientifically, or are self-serving statements by hospital executives that "care was never compromised, and nobody was injured" simply being taken at face value?
Further, the obvious increased risk of harm due to deficient IT currently in operation is being cavalierly ignored. This is alien to medicine, and could cause career termination or land people in jail in fields such as aviation if planes with known potentially-dangerous avionics software or other defects are kept flying - ed.]
In spite of its inadequacies, the Deloitte report seen by the SMH said the $AU100-plus million Cerner FirstNet system is too entrenched to abandon.
[I'm quite sure dead or injured patents would not appreciate that explanation - ed.]
Over the weekend, opposition health spokesperson Dr Andrew McDonald issued a statement accusing NSW health minister Jillian Skinner of covering up the report since August 2011.
However, other published studies into FirstNet, such as a detailed investigation by Sydney University e-health expert Professor Jon Patrick here [2], identify problems similar to those apparently cited by Deloitte. This study was undertaken to investigate issues with FirstNet outlined in November 2008 in a special commission of review, conducted by Peter Garling,
While noting that FirstNet represented an improvement on some aspects of its predecessor, Garling said the system attracted complaints that it was unfriendly to users, that the vendor and Health Department did not respond to complaints about the software, and that emergency department patients were being held in triage for excessive times, while clinical staff fought with the software.
[What sane patient would want such a system used in their care? - ed.]
Deloitte, on the other hand, was far less critical of FirstNet in 2008, when in a review [3] of triage benchmarks it managed to turn up a downtime issue, difficulty in uploading triage data to the Health Department, and the identification of the wrong doctor or nurse with a patient’s records.
Stunning.
On the argument that "the older system was worse", or the corollary argument that "paper harms and kills too", I suggest anyone who proffers that argument should realize VIOXX (refoxicib) helped far more people than it harmed in reducing pain while sparing them from GI side effects compared to "older" drugs.
Over 84 million people were prescribed rofecoxib at some time and only mere thousands, or tens of thousands, are presumed to have been injured or died.
Therefore, following their own illogic and ethical (dis)orientation, they should put all their family members on the drug - especially the elderly with cardiovascular disease - to benefit from pain relief and VIOXX's other miraculous effect, suppression of colonic polyps.
Surely those benefits outweigh the risks, and therefore it is ethical to do so, no?
Of course not.
Health IT, as I've written in many posts on this blog, has a magnitude of harms that is admittedly unknown. Health IT needs significant further study and improvement, certainly before national rollouts, and before decisions are made that particular systems are "too entrenched to abandon."
-- SS
