Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Sunday, August 07, 2016

AusHealthIT Poll Number 331 – Results – 7th August, 2016.

Here are the results of the poll.

The ADHA Is Apparently Planning 'Compulsory Health Records for all Australians' According To A Slide From HIC 2016. Do You Agree?

Yes 9% (9)

No 87% (88)

I Have No Idea 4% (4)

Total votes: 101

Seems that idiotic idea gets the big thumbs down!

A great turnout of votes.

Again, many, many thanks to all those that voted!

David.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Compulsory Health Record for every Australian !!!! Automatic enrollment (Opt-out) will take My Health Record registrations from 4 million to 24 Million so each registration will be at an average cost of $1.5 billion ++ divided by 24 million customers = $62.50 each. Australia will be the only country in the world able to claim it has an online health record for everyone all for a modest outlay of $60 to $80 per person. Does this equate to an Olympic Gold?

Anonymous said...

Medical Republic exposes the great ePIP con .... see: $50k for 200 keystrokes per quarter on ePIP?

Anonymous said...

“A practice can earn up to $50,000 per year if they send up to 0.5% of their SWPE (standardised whole patient equivalent) count in shared health summaries to the MHR database per quarter over one year.”
Surely this can't be so ...... as Medical Republic article says “The problem is, how does anyone know when the 0.5% is achieved and where they are up to each quarter in order to achieve it? After announcing the incentive, it was quickly realised that because of privacy concerns the government couldn’t actually monitor and report back to a practice how much they‘d done, so the problem was left to the practices to sort out.

In other words My Health Record receives the information from doctors / practices but doesn’t have a way of knowing how to use that to determine a practices SWPE entitlement.

If there is any semblance of truth in the Medical Republic story then we are potentially looking at a huge source of funds (say in the order of 5,000 practices x $50,000 = $250 million) open to fraud. No disrespect to the doctors it simply looks as though government policy over management and control of taxpayer’s funds is (once again) wide open to abuse.

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

Even if practices comply with the letter if the law it is a valueless activity.

It might actually have the reverse effect of what the government wants.

It could highlight to GPs just how useless an activity it is for them. They do all the hard work, someone else may or may not get some benefit.

The government still isn't saying how many MyHRs have been downloaded and used in health care - as opposed to views, which may have no health care outcomes at all.

And even more importantly, how much money has been saved by using the MyHR.

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

And talking about costs:

How much is it costing to maintain My Health Record?

More than $550m/year. Benefit: Approximately Zero

Government payments to GPs:
$250 million (5,000 practices x $50,000 each)

Payment to Accenture to run IT
$140million

Cost of Australian Digital Health Agency
$157million (2016/17 budget papers)

A minimum of approximately $550million/year.

(Does not include the costs to Health Service Providers for Health Data Management directly attributable to My Health Record)

Anonymous said...

@Bernard,

PHNs are not free either... That group of organisations yet with not real KPIs (ehealth/'Digital Health' + others) are an additional expense too...

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

Anon,
August 13, 2016 3:33 PM

Thanks,
Would you care to estimate how much they will spend in support of the MyHR?

According to this tweet:
https://twitter.com/mpwoodhead/status/717162141401264128

The Northern Queensland PHN have hired 23 people (not all full time) to take a year just to set up MyHR.

BTW, the really big number is the cost of GP/specialist's time.

If there are 80,000 GPs and Specialists in Australia (in 2011 the total was 68,000 - ABS data )

and if, in supporting the MyHR, they take an additional 5 hours per week at $100/hour, in a year that will have cost the health industry (the country) a cool $2billion.

The claim is that GPs will save time when seeing new patients by having access to their MyHR. I suggest that the time taken to access the system, download the record and read and validate a patient's MyHR will be, on average, roughly the same as the time a GP would have taken to ask the patient for their relevant history and current symptoms.

And if a patient carries a health summary - as David recently did. The MyHR becomes quite irrelevant - but costly.