Over the week several readers of my blog, eHealth Musings, have asked me to comment on eHealth Ontario’s recent decision to terminate its contract with CGI to build an electronic Diabetes Registry. Check out my article on this topic at Technology for Doctors.
Mike
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To comment on one of the points in the article, we did a review of evidence and a replicated study on the failure rate of IT projects in general a couple of years ago: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MS.2008.107
The data suggest that the failure rate (depending on how you define it) is not as high as some people say it is, but is still unacceptably high. Failure can be defined as not meeting requirements or deadlines or budget, or it can be defined as cancellation before delivering anything.
While I understand that many tech ventures fail and govt’s procurement system slowed things down, I think the diabetic registry was DOA for one very obvious reason, one which you mentioned as a reason why it is dead now, but one that should have applied years ago. That is that doctors do not want to use two systems. Now no one wants to leave their EMR and log into another system. Same would have applied years ago when doctors were primarily using paper records. Bottom line is that this would also slow them down for probably no or very little compensation.
Any ehealth solutions better make sense from a workflow standpoint or doctors will have to be bribed to use them, kind if like doctors are getting subsudies at this time with the current generation of EMRs, which are for the most part pretty cumbersome.