Leanne Castley says Auditor-General should explore digital health record 'fiasco'

Performance data on the territory's health system, including emergency department wait times and elective surgery wait lists, has been unable to be reported since the system was implemented late last year.

Opposition health spokeswoman Leanne Castley said this was crucial information and said there was a "high risk" the territory government would be unable to meet national reporting submissions.

"Reliable health data for external reporting by Canberra Health Services, to support the community, decision makers and Commonwealth bodies, is still not available after nine months," she said.

The digital health record, which went live last November, collated all paper and digital records in the territory's public health system under the one electronic system.

It is used daily by health workers to access the health records of patients in the system but it is also used to report on hospital performance data.

The ACT budget normally includes data from the past financial year on the number of emergency department patients seen in the clinically recommended time frame, the number of elective surgeries conducted in the clinically recommended time frame and data from a "patient experience survey".

But this data was unavailable due to digital health record as processes for the collection and collation of service data were still under development.

"The Health Directorate and Canberra Health Services have agreed that further refinement and quality assurance is required prior to releasing this data," budget papers said.

"With the wealth of additional data provided by the new DHR, it is imperative for additional quality assurance and validation on this data before publication.

"This will ensure our public hospital data provides trustworthy information and evidence about the health and welfare of all ACT residents."

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Ms Castley said she had asked the Auditor-General to conduct a peformance audit of $327 million system, which she described as a "fiasco".

The Auditor-General has already flagged a potential review of the digital health record in its proposed plan of audits which was released last month.

"The ACT government allocated $2.2 billion for Canberra's public health system, but taxpayers don't have data on our public health performance. This is not acceptable," Ms Castley said.

Ms Castley also said the digital solutions division in ACT Health had warned in October 2022 there would be issues with reporting data. She said they warned this would impact reputation and funding.

Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said, in March, the digital health record had identified more than 20,000 medication and therapy orders that were avoided over a three-month period.

She said it had also offered additional protections for sensitive patient information and more than 90 per cent of results had been released to individual patient records within one day.

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