Enterprise Patient Administration System

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (15:15): Supplementary: given the minister's answer, does the minister agree with the Auditor-General, who in his report today says:

Our EPAS testing identified instances of workstation and device delays in responding to user input, document scanning inefficiencies and printing slowness. We also identified that not all details are electronically transferred between EPAS and ESMI—

That's the medical imaging system—

for known patient infection controls, alerts and precautions. These activities require additional resourcing effort to address hospital staff concerns…

EPAS patient treatment related orders can be placed by an administrative officer (non-clinical staff), increased controls are required for medical officer details registered in EPAS and hospital billing and transaction issues remain…

Full remediation of most issues is planned to be completed by March 2017.

The Hon. J.J. SNELLING (Playford—Minister for Health, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Health Industries) (15:16): I can only reiterate what I just said: I completely reject any suggestion that any delay in the hospital has anything to do with EPAS. With regard to our being ready to roll EPAS out to the hospital, of course we will be ready. EPAS is ready to go out to the hospital. The only issue will be the scope at which we roll it out, as we have already stated, not because of issues regarding EPAS readiness but just because of change management on the part of clinicians. We don't anticipate that we will be rolling out the full scope of EPAS, but we have workarounds to address those issues.

With regard to what is raised in the Auditor-General's Report, I haven't had an opportunity to be briefed by my department, but it would be very unusual for an Auditor-General's Report to not address any issues and to give a completely clean bill of health to any project in government. The Auditor-General's job is to go through all these projects with a very fine-tooth comb, and to pull out issues, no matter how small, and bring them to the attention of the parliament.

The Department for Health has been working very closely with the Auditor-General's Department to resolve all those issues and any issues which have been raised previously by the Auditor-General. When I had a quick look in the Auditor-General's report, he was reasonably complimentary about the steps which the department had so far taken to address issues that had been raised in previous reports.