It was obvious there was a mad scramble to get the PR in place over the weekend of May 7 to 8 and press releases duly popped up on Monday in the defence industry magazines. While we understand a little bit of cloak and dagger around Department of Defence IT announcements, JP2060 has never exactly been a secret so who knows why it took so long to announce. The contract was published on AusTender on April 14, right in the middle of the election campaign, so politics can’t be part of it, and the carve off of the Phase 3 deployable health capability aspect was announced two years ago, with Saab and Philips named late last year as the winning bidder.
Whatever the reasoning behind it, the good news is there is a bucketful of good local companies who are involved in the project. PMS vendor MediRecords and telehealth platform Coviu were announced to great fanfare in Pulse+IT last year, and health informatics firm Alcidion hinted at it in one of its reports to the stock exchange in January, with subsequent details released last week about its role as a data aggregator and longitudinal record keeper for all of the disparate elements of the project.
Quite frankly, it was great to see loads of local companies getting a go, including Titanium’s dental software, instrument and asset tracking vendor Precision Medical, and Fred IT’s market-leading pharmacy and ePrescribing solutions. We must admit we hadn’t heard of data analytics and tactical planning specialist Ascention – let us know anonymously if they’re any good – and we also don’t know of “low code solution platform providing case management” vendor OutSystems. We had heard of Cerner of course, but exactly what they were offering we don’t know as they didn’t reply to our queries, but it’s pretty much obvious so whatever.
We’ll watch the development of this new system closely, although given it has been 20 years in the making, we might still be waiting for news in 2042. By that time, there might be some movement on interoperability in the healthcare system and all of it will finally be useful.
The other big story this week was former ADHA exec Monica Trujillo’s move from Cerner to Telstra Health. Dr Trujillo is beginning a new position as chief health officer at Telstra Health, while Michael Draheim will step up into her former role as CCIO at Cerner. Good luck to both Monica and Michael, who have always been very generous with their time, advice and knowledge, and who both remain some of the best advocates for digital health in Australia.
But forgive us here at Pulse+IT if we pay particular homage to the marvellous Vince McCauley, who is returning to his private pursuits after seven years as CMO/CMIO at Telstra Health. There are few people in the country who know more about health informatics than Vince. A qualified medical doctor and computer scientist, a software developer with particular expertise in pathology terminology, a health informatician and a standards expert extraordinaire, Vince provided brilliant input into Pulse+IT over many years, including in its early years as a print magazine and as we began the transition to digital, and he has continued to be one of the yardsticks we go by. |
