It Seems Clinicians Are Still Not All That Impressed With The myHR!

This appeared last week.

GP continue to shun MyHealth Record scheme

Paul Smith | 30 March, 2016 | 

Only 380 GPs appear to be actively using the billion-dollar MyHealth Record despite its recent Federal Government “reboot”.

According to Department of Health figures, 378 “providers” updated or uploaded a shared health summary (SHS) to the system in February.

Only 60 providers in Queensland posted the summaries — meant to be MyHealth Record’s information backbone — during the month.

In WA there were only 19 providers; in SA just 18 and in Victoria just 51.

From next month, the government will attempt to put more pressure on doctors to become involved by making it mandatory for GP clinics to upload a fixed number of summaries to receive ehealth Practice Incentive Program payments.

The summaries include a list of current medications, diagnoses, allergies and immunisation histories.

February 2016: documents uploaded/updated to MyHealth Record

	Shared health summaries	Discharge summaries	Event summaries	Specialist letters	Diagnostic reports
ACT	2	52	1	0	0
NSW	1661	15,895	178	505	0
NT	3960	2,104	7,887	1115	1946
Queensland	727	4,939	51	0	0
SA	85	874	56	0	0
Tasmania	160	660	6	0	0
Victoria	324	678	417	0	0
WA	164	535	27	0	0

While GP engagement with the MyHealth Record remains extremely patchy, hospitals in northern Sydney and north Brisbane have begun uploading patient discharge summaries en masse.

A total of 15,700 and 4600 were uploaded, respectively, during February.

More here:

http://www.australiandoctor.com.au/news/latest-news/gp-continue-to-shun-myhealth-record-scheme

What is interesting here is, with the absence of the NT (which uses a different system) is how few clinicians are actually uploading shared health summaries.

Approximately 6000 Shared Health Summaries a month - when you think of the number of GP consultations per month - just highlights how little the system is being used.

Pity the money being spent on this is not being spent to add some real value.

There is also a long and very well researched article in the Financial Review from last weekend which makes some interesting points:

• Apr 2 2016 at 12:15 AM

'One size fits all' a recipe for ill health in endless medical records quest

by Tim Binsted

How's this for a truly awful example of everything that's wrong with the health system:

Patient A is a 57-year-old customer of health insurer nib. She had 19 hospital admissions over a two-year period, costing nib in excess of $85,000, "due to her multiple chronic ailments, lack of care co-ordination of her healthcare needs and siloed communication across primary care, hospitals and specialists involved in her care," according to the insurer.

Mrs A, who had a history of pulmonary hypertension, diabetes, chronic back pain and numerous other chronic diseases, is the archetype of the high-care patient at the centre of the Turnbull government's big new plans for primary health care in this country.

Only on Thursday Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Health Minister Sussan Ley said care for the chronically ill will be overhauled under a new system of Health Care Homes, in which electronic records will be a key component.

Australians with high-care needs see up to five different GPs a year. About 20 per cent of the population live with two or more chronic diseases, and half of all avoidable hospital admissions in 2013-14 were due to chronic conditions.

"There is still far too much evidence of overservicing, overcharging and avoidable treatment," nib managing director Mark Fitzgibbon says.

At the centre of this debate is a concern that the Federal governments much vaunted national My Health Record has failed to reach most Australians. Since it was launched in 2012, 2½ million people have signed up, vastly less than is needed to make the system a truly national record.

In frustration private health providers are creating their own systems. While this is helping lift the number of people with easily accessed data, there are risks that the process will ultimately lead to a fractured national record.

Good progress but much to be done

"I think [the private health insurance] industry is making good progress on this front, but there is much to be done. At nib we're especially interested in helping people make better decisions around their treatment options and choice of health-care provider through initiatives such as Trip Advisor style [website] Whitecoat," Fitzgibbon says.

New Medibank chief executive Craig Drummond said this week that the nation's soaring medical costs, which have pushed health insurance premiums up by 5 to 6 percentage points a year for the last decade, are unsustainable.

Leading up to Friday's Council of Australian Governments meeting, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill dismissed $5 billion of extra federal funding for state hospitals as "a Band-Aid on a much bigger wound."

One of the most egregious shortcomings is the failure to share and collect patient information. This syndrome, with its endless anecdotes of repeat orders for unnecessary tests and scans, and wasted medicines, has become a symbol of the waste and inefficiency endemic in the health system.

"We can't co-ordinate before we're connected," Calvary Health Care chief executive Mark Doran says.

"Ambulances don't talk to New South Wales Health. In the ER [emergency room] they ring on the phone to tell you something is coming and they write it down on a piece of paper. It is crazy. Why wouldn't the ambulance be transmitting data to the hospital?"

Despite past failures, billions of taxpayer dollars are once more being thrown at e-health initiatives including a fresh $485 million injection into the federal My Health Record program.

Lots more here:

http://www.afr.com/business/health/one-size-fits-all-a-recipe-for-ill-health-in-endless-medical-records-quest-20160330-gntvkp

These few lines really say what most who read here know:

“The Grattan Institute's Dr Stephen Duckett says Australia's pursuit of e-health "has been a tragedy".

"We are way behind other countries, such as Denmark, and we have started off in so many of the wrong places to the extent that the then-Labor government conceptualised success not in terms of meaningful use, but in terms of how many people signed up," he says.

While governments tinker and try to push systems on to doctors and patients, healthcare providers are finding solutions based on the needs of patients and clinicians.”

David.