Shadow Minister for Health Leanne Castley has described an IT project meant to consolidate Canberra and Calvary Public Hospitals separate pharmacy inventory management systems (PIMS) and interface them with the Digital Health Record as a debacle.

Ms Castley said according to documents obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI), the PIMS project has been tracking Red, or not under control, every month from February to June.

“The Health Minister must now own up as to whether the $770,000 budgeted for this PIMS project has been wasted,” Ms Castley said.

“This is yet another example of a project that is failing under this Labor-Greens government and Canberrans have every right to know if their taxes are being wasted."

Ms Castley said a medications management software product, MerlinMAP, had been selected for the PIMS project. However, according to ACT Health’s Digital Solutions Division June performance report:

• The PIMS Project Board continues to express extreme frustration with the MerlinMAP system. Nearly 12 months since implementation at CPHB the system remains barely a minimum viable product.
• The Merlin/MerlinMAP solution… does not meet all business requirements for the pharmacy departments.
• The Calvary Director of Pharmacy reported patient impacts on timely access to medications and staff dissatisfaction with the functionality of the product.
• Cyclical stocktakes at Calvary have not been operational since go-live (June 2022) and there is real concern about capacity to do a EOFY stocktake.
• MerlinMAP remains barely a minimum viable product with significant amount of resource time being dedicated to basic operations.

"Most concerningly, the PIMS Project Board lacked confidence in the capacity of the vendor to make substantial improvements in MerlinMAP functionality beyond a minimum viable product.

“The Project Board recommended expanding the PIMS’s scope to include the delivery and integration of an Electronic Controlled Drugs Register (ECDR), used for the recording of dispensed and received controlled drugs.

“However, as of June the project’s schedule was immaterial. There was insufficient budget to implement ECDR, additional sources of funds were near exhausted and the ECDR funding issue had an ‘extreme’ rating,” Ms Castley concluded.