The Messages From The ADHA Chair In The Annual Report And Associated Release Require Close Scrutiny.

Here is what Dr Elizabeth Deveny writes. (p9)

Chair’s message

On behalf of the Australian Digital Health Agency Board I would like to recognise the immense efforts of everyone who has worked with us over the past year and extend our thanks to all of the Agency’s staff for their achievements, dedication, and resilience. I am especially honoured to Chair the Agency’s Board and would like to acknowledge the work of the previous Chair, Jim Birch, and our outgoing Board members [Robert Bransby, Dr Eleanor Chew, Stephanie Newell, Michael Walsh, Professor Johanna Westbrook] all of whom were pivotal to the achievement of the Agency’s goals over the past year. Australia’s health system is consistently ranked among the best in the world in international studies, something that we should be both proud of and greatly reassured by. Moreover, our digital health initiatives lead the world in many respects.

My Health Record is now a fundamental feature of Australia’s health infrastructure, a resource that clinicians and consumers will increasingly rely on in clinical workflows and personal health management. The expansion and transition of My Health Record is but the start of the journey for the Agency, there are a number of foundational steps outlined in the National Digital Health Strategy yet to be realised. We will need continued focus as we build the next pieces of national infrastructure and further strengthen our partnerships. Technology has the capacity to improve safety and convenience, while at the same time reducing health inequalities by extending these capabilities to communities that have been hard to service by conventional methods. Our challenge is to ensure that in building these technical foundations, the consumer’s experience of care remains the touchstone for all our collective efforts.

A collaborative and open approach has always characterised the Agency’s major endeavours, and this would be an appropriate time to reaffirm that commitment. Quality and safety are cornerstones of effective healthcare, and these traits are fostered and sustained by open, honest conversations and transparent environments. We will continue to be open to conversations, open to new challenges, open to opportunities and open to new ways of thinking.

It would be a disservice to this spirit of openness to not acknowledge that this transition has been accompanied by far more controversy than anticipated, but we have listened. The community has spoken and said that it wants better health outcomes enabled by technology. A raft of digital enablers will follow from these initial steps towards the digital enhancement of health and care, further enhancing the benefits for all Australians. Once again, I wish to extend my heartfelt gratitude to all our staff and stakeholders who have supported us so far, and welcome new voices to the ever-developing national conversation on digital health. We are still in the early days of transformation, but the broad outlines of an equitable, accessible and better future are coming into view.

Dr Elizabeth Deveny Chair

The report is downloadable to read from this link.

https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/about-the-agency/publications/reports/annual-report/Annual_Report_Australian_Digital_Health_Agency_2018-2019_Online.pdf

Here is the associated press release.

Media Release: Significant progress made on the National Digital Health Strategy

4 November 2019: The Australian Digital Health Agency 2018–19 Annual Report has been tabled in the Australian Parliament, outlining the Agency’s outcomes and operations between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2019.
“The 2018–19 Annual Report shows the Agency is making significant progress toward the key priorities set out in the National Digital Health Strategy, endorsed by all state and territory governments through the Council of Australian Government (COAG) Health Council,” says Agency Chief Executive Officer, Tim Kelsey.
The Annual Report shows that in 2018–19, the Agency:

• Provided My Health Records for 90 per cent of Australians, equipping people and their care professionals with centralised, digital access to vital health information.
• Improved access to clinical information in My Health Record, with more than one billion documents uploaded to the system and significant increases in the number of providers uploading information.
• Developed a national framework, and new interoperability standards, to ensure health professionals can securely and quickly send patient information to one another without using a fax machine.
• Released the Pharmacist Shared Medicines List (PSML) document type to further improve medicines safety, piggybacking on the success of the Medicines View document and its aggregation of all relevant medicines and allergy data in a single, real-time view.
• Facilitated consultations across every state and territory to lay the foundation for Australia’s next Interoperability Roadmap, which will set the direction for improving the ability of health systems to securely communicate with one another.

“Whereas in previous years our focus was on rebuilding momentum for digital health and on designing the way forward with our partners, in 2018 – 19 the Agency successfully implemented key parts of the National Digital Health Strategy to support improved health outcomes for Australians,” says Mr Kelsey.
“Today My Health Record is a fundamental feature of Australia’s health infrastructure, with a total of 1.5 billion documents in the system, with 523 million of those uploaded since 22 February 2019. We’ve made important strides in a range of other areas, such as supporting secure messaging and information exchange between healthcare providers.
“These types of accomplishments are improvements in themselves, but they also provide the foundations for future progress. We look forward to building on those foundations with all our partners in the community to support improvements in the health and wellbeing of all Australians.”
ENDS

https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/news-and-events/news/media-release-significant-progress-made-on-the-national-digital-health-strategy

Now everyone knows I am a critic of the ADHA but these couple of pages are just over the top.

Just a few points:

1. To claim “Moreover, our digital health initiatives lead the world in many respects” is just arrant nonsense as far as anything the ADHA is leading while not diminishing some genuinely world leading efforts from our universities and research institutes, far out of the ADHA’s reach!

2. Equally to suggest “My Health Record is now a fundamental feature of Australia’s health infrastructure, a resource that clinicians and consumers will increasingly rely on in clinical workflows and personal health management.” Is just arrogant grandstanding! There is no evidence either the public or clinicians find the My Health Record a useful or compelling offering.

3. This claim “A collaborative and open approach has always characterised the Agency’s major endeavours, and this would be an appropriate time to reaffirm that commitment” when not a single Board note has been published in over 11 months is clearly not in accord with the truth. The failure to disclose any clinical usage statistics just confirms how wrong the claim is!

4 This enthusiasm for piling up secondary documents in a huge, difficult to search data-base is a farce. This claim that “Today My Health Record is a fundamental feature of Australia’s health infrastructure, with a total of 1.5 billion documents in the system, with 523 million of those uploaded since 22 February 2019.” When no evidence of any significant use of the hoard is provided it just reeks of attempted misdirection.

5. Most of the subsequent claims are yet to actually see any real impact of genuine implementation of the scale and import claimed.

I could go on but it is simply not worth it. The Annual Report is a piece of glossy propaganda and little else, as expected.

David.