Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

Post by vertex-four » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 9:22 AM UTC

pimmen wrote: post #99

vertex-four wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All at the low, low risk of creating e.g. a centralised Government database of trans people, or people with HIV, or whatever the next big scare is.

Yes, not saying it's perfect or couldn't be used for evil, just like the FBI isn't perfect and can be used for evil. We have to weigh the options and legislate in a way that mitigates the ways it can be used for bad things. Again, just a few percent in efficiency could mean thousands upon thousands of lives saved. I'm sure a lot of HIV positive people who were mistreated would've loved that.

FWIW, this isn't a "could be" used for evil, it's a "will be" - there's no particular reason why Government databases of people with certain characteristics have been used to oppress and murder people in the past, but won't in the future. I'm young enough, and there's enough public opposition to people with my medical history, that there's a very high chance that my country decides that I no longer deserve protection of my human rights at some point in the next century at the very least - so I'd like to make it a little bit harder for them to figure it out.

Post by GlennS » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #46

dav43 wrote: post #10

As part of my work, I've had to read a fair amount of the legislation and reports coming out in this sector and also the "Consumer Data Rights" legislation (similar to the UK's open banking scheme. What I found was a massive difference in policy coming out from the same government but in two seperate streams of work. A) Consumer Data Right (legislation being built into Australia Privacy Act) focusing on banking, ener…

I'm trying to compare it to the UK system, with the NHS "spine" and the huge failed NPfIT: http://digitalhealthage.com/digital-health-lessons-npfit/ . But I don't really know enough detail.

I wasn't directly involved with NPfIT, but was working for a small healthcare IT company in the UK at the time, and did have some opportunities to talk to some of the lazy incompetents involved.

I can tell you at least that Accenture were heavily involved in NPfIT too. They were forced out with the work uncompleted, although they somehow managed to dodge most of the fine.

There are some obvious lessons to take away about trying to avoid projects which have massive scopes and vague, changing requirements.

Also that contracting out to a consortium doesn't mitigate risk or project size, because the hardest parts of most IT projects are 1) deciding what to build and 2) dividing up the work into the correct pieces.

For me, though the main lesson is that contracting IT systems is really risky if you don't have in-house engineers to vet it. Companies with no competence in delivering software will sell you the wrong things at the wrong prices, and they will do it really convincingly.

For those who work in government, those companies will also have a terrible track record, but your institutional amnesia will prevent you from noticing, so you will hire them anyway. (Probably someone in your department previously attempted to get a company wiki to organise this sort of information, but ended up getting Sharepoint instead, and now no-one looks at it.)

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out