Human Services is e-health over again

It's funny watching the parallels between the health identifier program and the Department of Human Services consolidation.

Remember how strongly the medical community felt about having everyone's health data in a single database, just waiting to be stolen and used against them?

So the National E-health Transition Authority and co came up with a complex system that meant that any data would reside in individual repositories and be linked together via the identifier, only to be requested and used when required.

We seem to be seeing the same situation with the Department of Human Services now.

Back in December 2009, when the consolidation of Centrelink, Medicare and other agencies was announced, Human Services Minister Chris Bowen said that although the consolidation would mean an easy flow of information between agencies, the government would not have a "master file" on citizens and would "not be merging agency databases".

Now the project seems to be gaining momentum, with the spend for consolidation being announced in the budget, $157.6 million of which is to make a single services portal for transactions using a secure log-in.

The department will also be conducting a trial where customers can opt-in to having staff view all of their information across three agencies to have "a complete picture of a customer's interactions across the portfolio".

If they're not going to be holding data in one database, it will have to have a similar system to e-health, with separate repositories only being accessed in certain circumstances.

I can see this going two ways if the pilot shows benefits. Either Human Services rolls it out to everyone and deals with the concerns that come from that, in which case the employees will see it all as one database anyway, or it keeps such a service on an opt-in basis.

Of course, if it's opt-in, it won't be nearly as effective. And more expensive.

But, it could be a way to get Australians to swallow the thought of Australia.gov.au not only being somewhere that users can sign in with a single log-in for all government services, but also an ideal for employees to be able to see a complete summary of you from the eyes of the government — something that could be useful in many ways.

This, to me, is just as concerning as the ability for health workers to see your medical history, so I think we need to watch this trial closely.