In a stunning development:
The essay on Emergency Department electronic health record (EHR) problems in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) by medical informatics professor Dr. Jon Patrick, Health Information Technologies Research Laboratory (HITRL), University of Sydney, that I referenced in my posts “The Story of the Deployment of an ED Clinical Information System ? Systemic Failure or Bad Luck” and “NSW Nightmare and Overuse of Computers” has been censored. This apparently occurred at the level of the Ministry of Health.
The essay was available as item 6 at http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~hitru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=91&Itemid=146 . Attempts to download now provide a message “This document is not currently available.” I do not know if the vendor was involved.
This perhaps gives life to my aphorism “Live and let die” regarding health IT; let patients die so health IT can live.
(A copy of Professor Patrick’s report is still available at the links in my essays and my academic site here.)
This appears to be an overt example of suppression of academic freedom that I believe should receive widespread attention, most especially if there is retaliation of any kind against the professor.
I also believe this could escalate to a human rights issue regarding what appears to be deliberate censorship of critical information about IT systems that could possibly be putting large number of patients at risk. Imagine if this was a report about potentially defective nuclear reactor control systems or containment processes at biological hazards research sites.
I believe addressing the issues raised in the report would have been a far more responsible approach than censorship.
– SS
