This appeared a little while ago.
Media release - Better connected healthcare system already showing improved secure transfer of patient information
10 June 2020: Australia has a world class health system, and the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how important technology is to allow healthcare providers to communicate with each other securely and immediately.
Out of date contact details that healthcare providers have about healthcare services and other practitioners can mean that patients’ medical documents and information is not able to be sent from one healthcare provider to another. In a world where consumers can no longer be a conduit for delivering a referral letter or test result to another provider, and where our postal services are over capacity, an up to date electronic registry is more important than ever.
The Australian Digital Health Agency has built a Service Registration Assistant (SRA) to solve this problem. The SRA keeps healthcare service and practitioner information up to date with changes to contact details available immediately to authorised users.
Healthcare organisations can update their details in the SRA once, and this will automatically send these new details to all organisations they have authorised to receive their information. This might include hospitals, pathology and radiology services, public service directories, secure messaging providers and more. The SRA avoids the need for an organisation to update their information in multiple places and eliminates the need for hundreds of other directories around the country to manually keep their directories up to date.
Dr Steve Hambleton, a General Practitioner and Agency Clinical Reference Lead, noted that “not only will this innovation bring about efficiencies for practice support staff who will only have to update changes in practice information once, it will increase confidence at the point of care that all of the incoming information about our patients will be there, and that our outgoing address book is complete and up to date”.
Initial results from a trial of the SRA in Northern NSW has shown significant improvements in communications between healthcare providers. To date, of 187 practitioners who participated in the trial and shared their details with the Northern NSW Local Health District (NNSWLHD), 186 had to change or update their details during the trial period.
For the NNSWLHD, having the most up-to-date contact information is essential to ensuring hospital discharge summaries get to the right person as quickly as possible.
Discharge summaries can include information about a patient’s assessment, treatment plan and progress notes from their hospital clinician, and a digital copy is sent via a secure service to the patient’s nominated GP. This helps the GP to continue post hospital care through follow up appointments.
Interim CEO of the Australian Digital Health Agency, Bettina McMahon said maintaining accurate provider address details was a longstanding challenge across the Australian healthcare sector.
“What is great to see is that the necessary, reliable and timely sharing of patients’ healthcare information between their healthcare providers is being improved by this latest feature of Australia’s digital health system,” she said.
“Healthcare providers all over Australia are enthusiastically using digital health so we want to make things as easy and efficient for them as possible. This tool will bring the benefits of digital health to more Australians.”
The trial is a partnership between the Agency, the NNSWLHD and the North Coast Primary Health Network (NCPHN).
CEO of NCPHN Julie Sturgess said “The opportunity to trial the SRA means local healthcare providers are able to be at the forefront of innovation in digital health to drive better patient outcomes. The results from the trial are really positive and we are keen to continue to work with the Agency on the next phase of the trial.”
Chief Executive of the NNSWLHD Wayne Jones said “We’re always looking at ways to improve the experience of patients in our care, and this system will help support the safe transfer of care of our patients from hospital to their GP.”
Australian Association of Practice Managers’ CEO Nicholas Voudouris said “Practice managers play a key role in ensuring a patient’s healthcare providers – wherever they work and whoever they work for – have accurate and timely clinical information. That is why we welcomed this trial of new technology.”
After the completion of the trial, the SRA will be expanded to provide a better-connected healthcare system, improve the transfer of care between healthcare providers and give healthcare providers more timely and complete information to support the care of their patients.
Background
Discharge summaries and other healthcare documents are transmitted using special-purpose secure messaging services. Unlike regular email, the messages are encrypted to ensure the confidentiality of the message and must be sent to a special ‘secure message’ address. To successfully send a discharge summary, both the Northern NSW Local Health District and the secure messaging service providers need accurate and up to date information about the general practitioner, so they know where to deliver the secure message. However, when a general practitioner joins or leaves a practice, there are many government and non-government services that need to be advised through a myriad of paper and online registration processes. In turn, all those organisations need to update their internal address lists. The SRA solves this problem.
Here is the link:
Don’t you love it. The release claims the problem is solved when they are still to complete a trial.
Finding the correct destination for a message is clearly major part of having a secure messaging system work. Having a voluntary system for this updating just ensures delay and omission of some of the needed updates.
The system may help but it does not solve the end-point location problem. Yet again they over-reach in the release.
David.
25 comments:
Two points.
1. why is it the ADHA has no understanding of what ”solutions” they are implementing?
2. Why are we spending so much money supporting NSW? Is it not time we had a new Jurisdiction represented on the board?
Since its invention ADHA remains a laggard to the digital world and, to date, barely disrupted. Enormous investment in going digital – digitising forms and processes is manifesting through commercial involvement. Although pleasing, it is a sugar hit. Without a national body to ensure standards are adopted and conformance to a set of agreements is enforced we remain in a world of pocket universes. ADHA as a simple organisations hardly an information management and knowledge power house, its own systems reflect an inability to embrace what being digital truly means.
The time, perhaps, is ripe for a foundational redesign of government involvement in standardised and empowering a level playing field.
Critical to this rethink is a need to move from the traditional model built around jurisdictions, portfolios and specialist agencies to an approach that sees ehealth as a vast suite of interconnected services – designed for users, not government.
Or not
Last Friday of the financial year. Expecting a big announcement
There is an article in The Medical Republic
Fear and loathing in the emerging tele-verse
http://medicalrepublic.com.au/fear-and-loathing-in-the-emerging-tele-verse/30809
There is a discussion about the future, not just of tele-health, but of GPs and pharmacies and (although unstated) players like Amazon.
Relating what might happen to myhr in the future, it looks as though a fundamental assumption - that most patients will have a local GP who will be responsible for their patient's Shared Health Summary - will become unusual.
In addition, any thought that a patient's myhr will provide an ongoing, comprehensive record that any provider can refer to when a new patient rocks up, either in person or via tele-health, is a wild pipe-dream.
And if solutions to interoperability and secure messaging include pushing large amounts of raw data into myhr, it will just stress out the system (in the sense of information overload).
IMHO, there was some merit in the original concept of the PCEHR - i.e. creating a virtual record by joining up existing repositories. As we all know NEHTA failed to deliver that vision.
What was implemented was a dud. There is no way it can be rescued, especially as the healthcare environment changes round it.
ADHA Staffer. What is this the ”big announcement”?
I hope it was not this little gem you were referring to ADHA Staffer - https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/about-the-agency/digital-health-space/new-guide-on-using-online-conferencing-technologies-securely-for-healthcare
Apart from this looks like a complete waste of consultancy money they cannot even publish to the web properly anymore
"Healthcare professionals need to consider how well a platform will enable their organisation to protect sensitive information and comply with its legislative and professional requirements."
I always thought that that the role of Healthcare professionals was to help people with their medical problems and that the objective of Digital Health was to assist both patients and Healthcare professionals.
All this technology being thrust on Healthcare professionals seems to be having the opposite effect.
Do a search on "physician burnout technology" and see the scale of the problem. One of the ironies is that there are suggestions that even more technology could be used to address the problem of too much technology.
Have to like this bit, I take it no one tests anything anymore, a sure sign of poor leadership
The Using Online Conferencing Technologies Securely - A guide for healthcare organisations ‘Connected, secure consultations’ (HYPERLINK) provides advice on important issues including the need for secure configuration, well-implemented encryption, access control and multi-factor authentication (MFA) when conferencing online.
The worrying aspect is that this sloppiness is not an isolated event, it has become so widespread to be almost expected behaviour
"Healthcare organisations can update their details in the SRA once, and this will automatically send these new details to all organisations they have authorised to receive their information. "
So the Healthcare organisations have to keep their authorisations up to date, before changing their own details.
Gee, this has been as well thought through as the rest of their disasters.
I don't suppose the ”big announcement” was supposed to be that of the new ADHA CEO?
Maybe the person involved has now done their due diligence and discovered the sad reality of myhr.
Six months to find a new CEO is a bit strange.
Maybe this is the big announcement predicted for last week:
"Meredith Makeham to leave ADHA for academic post"
ADHA reminds me of a headless chook. Although that's probably always been a fair description.
How many of the senior people who left ADHA in the past couple of years have actually been replaced by external hires?
There's been some deckchair shuffling but little else.
"Meredith Makeham to leave ADHA for academic post" - She already had/has an academic post at Macquarie University.
Chief medical adviser to the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) Meredith Makeham will leave the agency at the end of the month to take up a position as associate dean of community and primary healthcare at the University of Sydney's Faculty of Medicine and Health.
She has also held academic and research positions with the University of NSW and Macquarie University's Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research.
I wish her well in her new post. Who is the replacement? The CMO is a mandated role. There is also now no clinical representation. So digital health has no business, clinical of technical leadership.
Yes that was one of the announcements. The level of politeness spewing from those now dismantling all opposition and enacting visions paybacks is evident. Be warned all quisling of her regime shall be addressed.
Not surprising as it seems to be the same core ‘NEHTA’ culprits the made such a mess in the transition and formation of ADHA and hamstrung true advancement in areas of criticality.
Timmy and Professor Meredith, along with the little-heard of Rowan delivered on their briefs – get the MyHR across the line with 90% registrations and hand the department an operationalised system. You can argue if any value was achieved etc.… But they can hold their heads high as they accomplished the primary goal.
Bettina and her collection of handbags on the other hand have been less successful in:
Interoperability and data quality
Secure Messaging
Terminology adoption
Standards development model
An organisation that hums and is compliant with government regulations and policies.
"they accomplished the primary goal."
"I was only following orders" - the Nuremberg defence.
The phrase can refer to any attempt to deflect personal responsibility for a crime onto institutions like an army or the state.
"they can hold their heads high"? I think not.
Less successful is being kind. Complete and utter failure more like.
July 04, 2020 10:41 PM. I think you miss the point July 04, 2020 6:39 PM was making. It is an observation that is quite troubling but seems to be a norm in the Agency.
July 05, 2020 9:02 AM It might not have been the point, but it's what happened and looks as though it will happen again. If they can get a CEO with no morals or ethics.
@11:17 AM Why on earth would you think a new CEO has any hope of making any useful and worthwhile improvements regardless of the individuals morals and ethics? Do you not understand the entire project has been built on the wrong premise, for the wrong reasons. In short, it has failed. Failed to deliver, failed to engage, failed to generate any meaningful benefits, failed to save money, filed to cost justify itself, failed to deliver secure essging, failed to deliver interoperability, failed to deliver a trusted health record, failed to ................ . Repeat question - do you not understand?
@July 05, 2020 1:16 PM
1. I agree
2. I understand
3. That's my point. Tim and his cohorts were selling a lie. They did so because they had no morals and/or ethics. $500k/pa is the going rate. The ADHA is now looking for someone to carry on the tradition. It obviously has not been easy.
As July 04, 2020 6:39 PM points out there was a raft of other initiatives under the COO watch. All have failed to deliver and have in fact allow things to become more fragmented and individualistic.
The MyHR is what it is, harping on about it only helps to divert attention from the real problems. You only need to see the low level activities ADHA is attracted to. They are unable.to think big and lead us through change.
Post a Comment