After a report confirmed the rollout of the iHealth system has been an expensive disaster -- BC's Health Minister says the system will not be expanded. Adrian Dix says he's hitting the pause button until solutions can be found under the guidance of a mediator:
"The problem has been a top down approach to implementation that has not worked. So tomorrow I'll be announcing the name of a mediator to address this issue in Nanamio. We're going to put the pressure on everybody, and empower everybody in Nanaimo to sort through the issues and to make the system work."
An Ernst and Young report found Island Health failed to budget adequately for the project. The initial cost was put at $173.5 million, but will now need at least $54.1 million to complete.
Dix says the huge expenditures have been a problem with projects launched by he previous Liberal government failing to be kept under control by gatekeeping:
" In other words if a project isn't working, if it doesn't show it's working you can shut it down early and move onto something else. Instead this project is $200-million, or north of $200-million. The one in Vancouver Coastal Health which is also behind schedule and over budget is $840-million. They were approving all of this money. And by the time they figured out whether a project worked or not they had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars."
Dix says steps are being taken to deal with what he calls "these legacies of the Liberal government".