Call in auditor general at UHWI
IT MAY be merely coincidental that Herman Athias’ resignation as the chief information and technology officer at the University Hospital of the West West Indies (UHWI) followed immediately on this newspaper’s report on the bungled implementation of a record-keeping software at the hospital, which may have been the wrong one for the job.
Perchance the two events are related, it is our hope that Mr Athias has not been made a fall guy for the misadventure, which has now gone for more than four years after its due date, and for which the hospital and The University of the West Indies (UWI) – both of which are substantially funded by Jamaican taxpayers – is in the hock for over J$500 million.
In the circumstances, notwithstanding the funding arrangement for this project, the auditor general, Pamela Monroe Ellis, is likely to be on good legal grounds to, and should, initiate an investigation of the scheme. And while she is at it, a broad performance audit of the hospital may be in order. Indeed, the vice-chancellor of the UWI, Sir Hilary Beckles, should himself invite Mrs Monroe Ellis to conduct such a review as well as instruct Dale Webber, the principal of the university’s Mona campus, to cooperate fully with the investigation.
Meanwhile, the UHWI matter reminds of the Government’s long-overdue report on the security cock-up earlier this year on its JamCOVID portal, exposing the private COVID-19-related and other records of thousands of people who travelled, or intended to travel, to Jamaica. Our sense is that the administration hopes that this is one of those issues that simply fades away as people forget.
Not fit for purpose
With respect to the university hospital matter, the agreement it signed in 2015 with the St Lucia-registered firm, Health Administration Systems (which appears to be a subsidiary of, or is otherwise connected to, an Indian technology company, Survana Technosoft) – should have led to the digitisation of the UHWI’s records, eliminating the need for paper dockets. The Jamaican company, Advanced Integration Systems, is in charge of the implementation/integration. The system was expected to be functional within nine months.
But as The Gleaner reported on Sunday, in a 2018 review, a UHWI doctor who then had oversight of the project, complained that “the application was not fit for purpose”. A system that was expected to largely provide off-the-shelf functionality was requiring “massive customisation”. He suggested that the programme was overhyped and that there was inadequate operational support from the vendors. However, Patrick Anglin, in that report, also pointed to the poor attitude of some hospital staff, who were indifferent towards the new system, which should not be surprising if it did not work.
Nearly three years on, the Hospital Information Management System (HIMS) is merely limping along, still incomplete and with little trust from doctors, nurses and administrative staff, which raise fundamental questions of what went wrong and why.
Image: pexels-thirdman