If you read the Sunday Age story on the $6000 grant to doctors to encourage them to participate in telehealth, you’d more than likely be convinced that it’s been one of those gravy train fiascos in which incompetent politicians and bureaucrats paid doctors a lot of money to buy technology that they could – and in some cases did – pick up for free.
The heading, “Free Skype ‘much better’ than Labor’s $7.2m telehealth grant” implies that, and so – sort of – does the first paragraph: “Rural doctors received $7.2 million from the federal government for software to enable them to communicate more easily with specialists, but some found downloading Skype was a better option.”
It gets worse. The story quotes “the head of a private nursing service” claiming that “doctors who downloaded various paid software programs found they were not compatible”.
You can judge from the comment thread how readers responded. Too many readers took the story at face value and responded with predictable insulting remarks about doctors, politicians, each other etc. (I am more and more convinced that newspapers of record such as The Age and Sydney Morning Herald should be taking the lead of some northern European newspapers and only printing online comments from readers who can be identified, as was long the requirement for letters to the editor.)
If you’re computer-literate, or if you recognise the signs of not particularly good journalism, however, you would be asking some serious questions about this story.
You’d be wondering if the reporter, and for that matter anyone in the news production chain – news editor, copy taster, sub-editor, check sub, chief sub-editor etc – was aware that video-conferencing requires hardware as well as software, and that telehealth is vastly more critical and complex and makes demands in terms of resolution and security, management and logistics than what one might require for conducting a casual video chat.
You’d be wondering perhaps if any of them had read the excellent piece in the November issue of Pulse IT, in which Chris Ryan, Principal Telehealth Consultant at Attend Anywhere, explores the issues and raises the sort of intelligent questions that the Sunday Age story, alas, comprehensively overlooks.
The Sunday Age reporter has cobbled together a cheap piece of tabloid innuendo, rather than a legitimate piece of journalism. In fact, the story self-destructs, as you discover if you bother reading on to the concluding two paragraphs:
A federal Department of Health and Ageing spokeswoman said the government was ensuring access to technical advice and that the payment to set up digital consultations was not meant only for software.
”It is paid to encourage change in the way doctors provide services, and recognises that incorporating telehealth into everyday work flows represents a significant change to traditional practice,” she said.
At that point you’d understand that the opening paragraph is complete bunkum. For one thing, it’s highly unlikely that rural doctors actually did receive $7.2 million from the federal government for software. The $7.2 million is presumably the total amount of the applications from 1200 doctors across Australia. I’d suspect the majority were not rural doctors at all.
And the $7.2 million is not just for video conferencing software.
There’s a lot to be done if Australia is to achieve worthwhile improvements in healthcare through telehealth. Several initiatives are already under way – they’re mentioned in Chris Ryan’s piece – but they must be co-ordinated nationally, and carefully managed. Doctors need to be given clearer direction so they can make the right choices.
As Chris Ryan points out, “Virtually no one giving advice from government, academia, industry or the health sector actually uses video conferencing in the way that they are asking others to – i.e. daily in their own offices to talk with lots of different people in different organisations, including on an ad-hoc basis.
“This is indicative of the human, organisational and technical issues involved. It’s not as straightforward as people think. If people do use video conferencing at work, it is most likely conventional technology and usually within their own or ‘joined up’ organisational networks, not what it is needed. It is no wonder that sometimes it appears to be a case of the partially-sighted leading the blind.”
I’d suggest that “blind” is probably too generous a description for this effort by the Sunday Age. At best, I’d suggest “lazy and ill-informed”. At worst,”irresponsible” and perhaps even “mischievous”. It’s demonstrably not up to Fairfax’s usual standards of journalism.
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