This appeared last week:
Practices win reprieve on e-PIP upload target
Antony Scholefield | 29 September, 2016 |
Practices will still be able to claim the e-health Practice Incentive Program payment even if they failed to meet the upload targets following a reprieve from the Department of Health.
The requirement for GPs to upload shared health summaries to the MyHealth Record for at least 0.5% of their patients has a new deadline of 31 January 2017.
The moratorium announced on Thursday by Health Minister Sussan Ley comes after a large number of practices fell short of the upload target and so failed to qualify for the e-health PIP in the third quarter (Q3) of the year.
Missing the target meant practices losing an average of $23,000 a year in federal funding.
Just 1500 of the 5000 eligible practices hit the target in Q3 and more than 200 practices withdrew from the program.
AMA president Dr Michael Gannon said the reprieve would give practices more time to prepare.
More here:
It looks like a good number of GPs have called the Minister’s bluff and made it clear they are rather less than convinced they deserve such a scale of penalty when their rebates are frozen.
General Practice really does not see the Minister and Department as trusted friends!
David.
4 comments:
I continue to be bewildered by the way ePIPs have been targeted. Perhaps I have misunderstood the objective of ePIPs. I have always thought their underlying purpose was to provide incentives to bring about change in the delivery of health services.
The entire 'concept' fails if a particular ePIP is inappropriately targeted.
Doctors should not be penalised if they do not meet a particular ePIP target if that target has been wrongly set which appears to be the case today.
Set the target correctly and the doctors will be motivated to achieve the ePIP goal and change will follow. When that focus is on certain aspects of 'eHealth', which jointly benefit the doctor and their patients, the uptake of eHealth will be quite rapid. The corollary is, that when an ePIP is wrongly focussed change will not occur. That seems to be what is happening today.
"The corollary is, that when an ePIP is wrongly focussed change will not occur." You have hit the bulls eye dead centre. The questions we should all be asking are:
- What should an ePIP be focussed on?, Why?, and How will it drive change?
Carrot & Stick is the small minded mentality of top-down bureaucratic management. As you say the Government wants to see change and that's valid. But let me ask - are they asking the peak bodies how they think change can be brought about or are they simply telling the peak bodies and their members what they have to do if they want to get paid. The dictatorial approach will fail every time.
The trouble is the change they really want is reduced costs, not improved healthcare. And morally and politically they can't even do the things that would actually reduce costs - limit healthcare services, not permit new and more expensive treatments and not spend on new diagnostic technologies.
That would be suicide at the polls.
Health is one of the few industries where modern technology increases costs, not reduces them. That simple lesson hasn't sunk in yet.
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