Great news for people that hate having their medical information correct: the whole My Health Record thing hasn’t even rolled out properly as yet and already there’s been a major “glitch”.
And it’s a glitch which means that patient records could be out of date and incomplete – which could be a potentially fatal sort of a glitch for people on new medication or changed therapies.
Who saw that coming? Everyone? Cool.
This glitch wasn’t meant to be public knowledge either: it was exposed thanks to the leak of an internal briefing to the Australian Digital Health Agency’s data integrity group falling into the hands of the Guardian.
That records had missing clinical data was a problem that was identified a while ago and still not solved.
However, the government has responded with a fairly defensive sort of a statement, insisting that the “The matter you refer to accounts for less than 1% of attempted document uploads from clinicians… The agency rejects any statement that the security or safety of the My Health Record system has been compromised.”
Of course, if 1 per cent of the Australian health records were wrong, that would still affect about 251,000 people. So not exactly a tiny issue.
Still, you know, it’s not like there weren’t warnings from your best friends here at GOAT…