Government 'attempting to rewrite history' over electronic health records, says Labour

Thursday, 22 October 2015

National Health IT Board director Graeme Osborne says he is 'disappointed' by what he described as attempts to pick holes in two strategies that build on each other.

The Government has been accused by Labour of 'attempting to rewrite history' by refusing to acknowledge its inability to deliver a flagship improvement to the health service.

Health Minister Jonathan Coleman has put a project to deliver electronic health records back on the agenda after missing a target to do that by 2014.

Labour's acting health spokesman David Clark said the project still appeared to be at an early stage, with consultant Deloitte having just supplied a report setting out the benefits.

Coleman deferred questions on why the project to deliver electronic health records by 2014 did not succeed to the Health Ministry.

Its National Health IT Board director Graeme Osborne said that: 'The Government did not set a target for electronic health records in 2014'.

That appeared at odds with a letter sent by the Health Ministry to Paul Hutchison, chairman of Parliament's Health Select Committee on November 8, 2013.

The letter, which was signed by Osborne and National Health IT Board chairman Murray Milner, said the board was 'delivering on two government policy commitments', one of which it said was 'to deliver an electronic health record for every person by 2014'.

Clark said the Health Ministry's claim there had been no 2014 target was 'unacceptable'.

'In late 2013, The National Health IT Board were smugly claiming they were delivering on the government policy commitment to establish an electronic health record for every person by 2014.

'That commitment is in black and white in an official parliamentary report signed off by directors of the National Health IT Board. Now in 2015, they have the bare-faced cheek to pretend a commitment was never made,' he said.

Clark said the Government should apologise to the public, as ministers had following the Novopay payroll debacle.

The National Health IT Board needed state how much had been spent on the project to date 'with seemingly nothing to show for it', he said.

Osborne said there was 'no national commitment' to an electronic health record in 2014.

'The letter said 'electronic health records' it doesn't say 'national electronic health records',' he said, referring to the letter sent to the select committee.

'What that letter was referring to is that GPs were opening up with patient portals to the information they had in their local practice.

'I am the leader of this whole programme – I wrote the plan – we never signed up to a national electronic health record.'

Osborne refused to say what had been spent on the Deloitte study, saying that was 'commercially sensitive'.

'The Government gets reports all the time by these sorts of organisations,' he said.

One of the goals set out in the 2010 National Health IT Plan and its subsequent revisions was 'a patient portal for consumers and general practices' which was a form of electronic health record, he said.

About 260 GP surgeries have chosen to buy patient portals sold by private-sector suppliers that let about 90,000 patients securely view information held by their GP and to communicate with them online. Such portals had been very successful, Osborne said.

Huge progress had also been made in other areas such as coordinating shared care to about 20,000 long-term patients,' he said. 'The national electronic health record investment is another step to a new stage.'

Clark did not believe the GP patient portals were what had been promised from prior references to electronic health records.

'They seem a very different thing from what was envisaged, and in any case there is no doubt they have failed to achieve the 2014 deadline,' he said.