This appeared this week:
- Nov 6 2016 at 6:30 PM
Trials indicate increasing patient confidence in My Health Record
Martin Bowles says about 25,000 health summaries a week were being uploaded in October.
by Hugh Arnold
Since his appointment in 2014, the secretary of the Department of Health, Martin Bowles, has been on a mission to promote culture change for everybody involved in the healthcare industry, including his own department.
"I did set out quite specifically in the early days to build strategic policy and innovation as the centrepiece. And what drove that was setting up data analytics, evaluation and research.
"It was a capability we once had for an old world. We now need to build it for the new world. If we don't understand the data and what is happening out there, how are we actually going to make informed policy decisions? And if you can't drive it culturally in our organisations, it won't catch on," Bowles said at the recent Innovation in Healthcare roundtable co-hosted by The Australian Financial Review and Philips.
A positive and recent success in culture change for patients, doctors – and ultimately data analytics nationally – has been the response to the opt-out trials of My Health Record in select regions such as North Queensland and western Sydney.
The Health Department says under the My Health Record trial, patients are able to share vital health information securely online, at any time, with authorised healthcare providers, such as doctors, pharmacists, specialists, hospitals or allied health professionals.
Patients have ultimate control over who accesses their information, including adding additional password protections; while doctors have indicated they are much more likely to use the system if all their patients have a record.
"The opt-out rate is just over 1 per cent. We were quite staggered it was that low. And people are saying why not? Why not actually go down this pathway? This is not only about individuals – this is about providers as well. For instance, we've seen the upload of health summaries from April this year at about 2000 per week; and are now at 25,000 per week just a fortnight ago [early in October]."
Bowles says overall there are 4.2 million people now enrolled. "If the opt-out trials are successful, and everything we've seen will suggest they will be, we will actually recommend to government that this is the way to go.
"Once you've got all of the summaries up and patients load their own documents, then there's a whole lot more things that you can actually get on system: your green book, red book, immunisation books and baby books, and God only knows what else.
"We can all then avoid duplication of testing, and actually get the right medications for the right time. And if you end up in hospital, either unconscious or unable to communicate, there is a record that people can see what actually is happening."
Lots more her:
As a sanity check we need to realise there are, in Australia 33,275 GPs, 22,005 were full service equivalent (FSE).
Here is the link:
Using the lower number we see there is an average of about 1 patient summary uploaded to the myHR for each GP each week.
Given the average GP sees around 40-50 patients a day for a five day working week it is clear that less that one in 200 encounters is actually resulting in a summary being produced – despite the financial incentives to use the myHR being offered.
One can only conclude that – as of right now – the system is essentially not being used despite 15%+ of the population being given a free myHR.
You can see the current statistics here:
Yet again no information as to how much use the records receive. I am sure we would be told if it was significant!
David.
6 comments:
Am I missing something here? Surely myhealthrecord is not fit for purpose when it comes to data analytics? Its mostly pdfs right? It isn't design for clinical use, nor is it designed for data mining. It was designed for some other purpose, whatever that was.
I would suspect the Minister is blissfully unaware and is being misled by the department who in turn either only hear what they want to hear or ignore the truth through fear. The big question is how much longer will it go on before so much information is trapped that it becomes near impossible to move away from static soloed documents of information. I see no one in the upper layers of ADHA bar maybe one or two board Memebers who have the background to grasp the detail
These are the numbers published on the myhealthrecord.gov.au site (I didn't get 9 Oct):
Shared Health Summaries
Date published 25-Sep 2-Oct 16-Oct 23-Oct 30-Oct
Summaries 326,894 338,893 360,529 374,866 389,740
Change 13,030 11,999 21,636 14,337 14,874
Shared Health Summaries are being uploaded at about 12,500 per week.
The only way I can get to around 25,000 per week is to add the numbers for Shared, Discharge, Event and Consumer Health Summaries.
They seem to be trying to make the numbers as good as they can.
Of course, health record registrations and uploading of documents are all very well, but the only value comes from the use of the data. I still haven't seen anything that tells us how many times a health record has been used as part of meaningful health care and/or how much my health record has saved the government (or anyone else, for that matter)
And with respect to David's analysis that 1 patient summary is uploaded to the myHR for each GP each week.
GPs only upload shared health summaries and event summaries, which, by my estimate is about 15,000 per week. A better guess would be that fewer than 3 patient summaries are uploaded to the myHR for each GP every month.
Bowles says overall there are 4.2 million people now enrolled. "If the opt-out trials are successful, and everything we've seen will suggest they will be, we will actually recommend to government that this is the way to go."
He also said "The opt-out rate is just over 1 per cent. We were quite staggered it was that low."
Paul Madden is quoted on Twitter today as saying:
"If national roll out of My Health Record occurs 2017, more brand recognition and education training needed."
https://twitter.com/NQPHN/status/798422106430177280
All the signs are there that they are flying the kite of mandatory MyHealthRecord
The claim that opt-out has been so low is disingenuous. The promised public education programme was noticeable by its absence and what the government says about the MyHR is selective and somewhat misleading.
It was designed to be opt-in and AFAIK this has not changed. It needs a complete redesign to make it opt-out and to fix all its the problems and failings. They also need to justify its existence in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
If ADHA produces a strategy that addresses all the outstanding issues identified by numerous parties in the past (which health didn't do in its draft ehealth strategy earlier this year) then they might be on a path to a degree of success.
However, what needs to be done will take a long time; something that may well not be acceptable to the politicians and public service mandarins.
The low opt-out rate was very predictable. It takes effort to opt-out this and if you are not engaged sufficiently you will not bother.
Given that the myEHR is what I call a 1% solution (ie. only likely to be used by 1% of the enrolled population more than once). A 1% opt-out rate is huge.
In summary, 1% opted-out, 1% might use the system and 98% aren't engaged. Fantastic value for the Australian taxpayer. NOT!!!!
For them to claim that this is a wonderful outcome is just hilarious.
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