ENTERPRISE PATIENT ADMINISTRATION SYSTEM

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:12): My question is again to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Why is the government proceeding to spend around $0.5 billion on eHealth projects, including the EPAS system of electronic health records, given Victoria's recent abandonment of their eHealth system, after they spent over $500 million trying to introduce it? In relation to Victoria's eHealth systems, the Victorian Ombudsman said, and I quote:

The project costing and timelines were ambitious and the Department of Health seriously underestimated the size of the task.

And that the eHealth system had:

...taken more than seven years to deliver only a partial implementation of the core clinical application.

Consequently, the attempt to introduce an eHealth system in Victoria has been abandoned.

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:13): Thank God we are not in Victoria. It is true that the Victorian system was a disaster and there have been a number of attempts in various jurisdictions over the years to introduce technology into various agencies, which have been unsuccessful. I am absolutely confident that the process that we have got in place in South Australia—the EPAS system—is working very well. In fact, we have employed—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The Hon. J.D. HILL: Ask a question if you want to, but don't interrupt me when I am providing an answer to the original question.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: The Deputy Leader of the Opposition is quick at interjections, but he is not allowed to ask real questions. He is on trainer wheels.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.D. HILL: He has still got his L-plates on. He should get advice from the member for Waite.

Mr GARDNER: Point of order.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! Point of order.

Mr GARDNER: No. 98: the minister continues to debate the issue. It is time to answer some questions, please.

The SPEAKER: Thank you. Minister.

The Hon. P.F. CONLON: The minister does not debate the issue, he answers persistent interjections. If the deputy leader would stop interjecting, he will answer the question.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Thank you. Order! Minister, I hope you have some silence to answer your question.

The Hon. J.D. HILL: This is a serious question. I take it seriously and it is a very important issue for parliament to understand. What we are attempting to do in the health system is to make sure that we have an integrated information system, so that any patient who goes to any of our hospitals has information recorded which is then able to be accessed by any staff member, any clinician, who works in any of our hospitals, if and when that patient returns to the hospital.

This produces huge efficiencies for the health system because it means the history doesn't have to be repeated. It means any of the clinical conditions that the patient has will then be known by any other clinician in the health system. So, if somebody came in, for example, unconscious, their record could be looked up, they could see what medications they are on, what they might be allergic to, what conditions they might need to have treated. This is absolutely the heart of making our health system modern. So, that's why we're doing it. It's not something we'd abandon for no reason.

In Victoria, this is the objective they had as well and the system that they tried to introduce did fall apart, it's absolutely acknowledged, but I can assure members of the house that the process we've gone through, and are going through, is absolutely on track. We have a very professional organisation, Zed Business Management, that is assisting us to do this. They are experts in this and, at the heart of introducing this system is not so much the rollout of the technology, it's the development of the culture change, it's the development of the individuals within the system who understand it.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of about 400 staff members who were amongst the early adopters of this technology, who will become the leaders in their various hospitals and institutions, who will then become the advocates and assist with the rollout of the technology in the hospitals. We have put the infrastructure largely in place now. We've been developing the software which is clinician led in many cases to develop the protocols that are applied, so that when the clinician at the bedside puts in information about the patient, the computer or the IT system leads them through a series of questions to help get to the right sort of conclusions.

So this is a very good system. It will include, when it is completed, capacity, for example, so a patient can order their meals through the system. If a patient, for example, is allergic to peanuts, the computer will say they can't order that particular meal, so it's a very sophisticated system. It's absolutely on track and the rollout will begin in our hospitals at Noarlunga initially early next year. They have chosen Noarlunga because of the size of the hospital so they can test it in a relatively small environment in an Adelaide hospital, so whatever the bugs are, and there will always be issues around implementation of any system, of course, but using that hospital as the starting point then it will be rolled out over the next couple of years across all of our metro hospitals and a number of country hospitals.