If there’s one topic that seems to keep coming up in some form or another throughout this issue of TIG, it’s case management. On page 6, for example, we see how Canada Health Infoway is investing $100 million in a case management system to track the spread of communicable diseases through electronic
patient records.
As well, the City of Laval, Que., has turned to Oracle’s case management software (story on page 9) to help it make the process of dealing with the city easier for residents.
Case management, according to a co-sponsored IDC/TIG survey on government IT spending (story on page 14), is one of government’s top three spending priorities for 2005. So far, case management tools are being implemented mostly on a department-wide basis, rather than across jurisdictions and levels of government.
As experts in the field have pointed out, there’s a very good reason for this — to protect the privacy of our information. But there are other even better reasons to find ways to share information while protecting privacy, particularly in areas such as health care and domestic security. This is not a new discussion, of course, but it seems logical that as government focuses more on figuring out the ROI of is IT expenditures, it will no longer make sense to duplicate databases, for example, if it’s possible to build just one and control the access to the information it contains.
