The Driver - Incompatible Technologies

If one organization is using paper, another MSExcel, another an ACCESS database, another a COTS product; government is using some custom built “green screen” legacy system, how are you going to cooperate electronically to compile relevant and useful statistics. You are not. You can only produce reports and have data clerks enter the information. A recent example of this chaos comes from the BC Ministry of Health. Contracted alcohol and drug counseling centers have to fill out a form for the services they provide to each individual client and submit the form by mail to the Ministry which sends it to the data clerks who then enter the information into a legacy system. If there is a question about the data or an error, the form is packaged back up and sent back to the agency who are expected to correct the information and send it back. It then goes back to the data clerk who brings up the relevant file and corrects the mistake. This process of data entry and re-entry costs approx. 1 million dollars annually for the 7000 forms a month. This could be done entirely online for probably 10% of that cost with cooperation between the agencies and the government in the technology solution. Why haven’t they done this? See section on privacy.