By David Bicknell
The Australian state of Victoria has scrapped a A$500m e-health IT project intended to create electronic patient records and prescriptions and will replace it with a ‘patchwork approach.’
According to a report in Victoria’s Herald Sun, Health Minister David Davis confirmed that the government had made a decision to scrap any further rollout of HealthSMART, a project to modernise the health system’s IT which began in 2003.
Davis said the Government would now work on a hospital-by-hospital basis, setting up individual systems.
The HealthSMART rollout began under the previous state Labour government and is now fully operational at just four health services across Victoria.
In a telling quote, Mr Davis said the Government was determined not to “throw more good money after bad” and would now set up an expert panel to advise it on the best way to upgrade the hospital ICT system.
Campaign4Change 
The scope of operations and the kind of treatment that is offered in various health facilities is not always the same, and it is because of this reason that IT experts ought to analyze the information processing needs of each hospital individually. Therefore, I think that the Australian government did the right thing by scrapping the generalized HealthSMART project that would have otherwise been difficult to integrate with various health institutions, and this would have been a waste of tax payers’ money.
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