Shadow Health Minister, Leanne Castley today slammed admissions by the Health Minister at ACT Budget Estimates today that she didn’t understand the risks around data reporting when going live with the Digital Health Record.

At Estimates today, Ms Stephen-Smith said:

“Some of the data challenges that we have faced post go-live are more substantial than I had understood pre go-live…”

“I think frankly it’s also fair to say that there were some people in the data teams who were telling us we were going to have more challenges with data than we had understood…”

“There some people in the frontline data teams who were expressing concerns around how long it would take to get to a point where we had very robust data for reporting; that I think some of the concerns we not being escalated appropriately through to the project board, if I’m being really frank about it...”

“This simply beggars belief,” Ms Castley said. “It was a ‘red’ risk.”

A month before go-live the Minister was briefed that there were residual high risks of, “problems with national reporting and submissions during the transition period from existing systems of DHR,” and of, “Inability to meet national submission requirements impacting reputation and funding.”

Another excuse offered by the Health Minister for this fiasco was that, “We were first in Australia to go live with so many aspects of the Epic system.”

Ms Castley said this begged the question as to whether it was prudent for the ACT to be the first mover on such a scale – trying to replace 40 different systems.

“CHS CEO Dave Peffer stated that in Queensland the DHR equivalent began with a single hospital, the state continued to report, they then resolved their reporting issues and then scaled uptake across the various hospitals.”

“And in Victoria they rolled out the equivalent Epic product within one health district, with the balance of the state still able to report on health services.”

Ms Castley said she had already asked the ACT Auditor-General to investigate this process.