As a final dissembling blast for the year – I hope – This appeared.
WA clinicians are using My Health Record to provide better continuity of care
Published 17 December 2020
Western Australian healthcare providers are continuing to increase their use of My Health Record, with more than 56,000 views in October.
With the graph still on a steep upward trend, it is clear that clinicians are embracing My Health Record as a vital tool in providing clinical care.
Chief Clinical Information Officer and Emergency Physician Professor Peter Sprivulis said WA Health clinicians are demonstrating with their clicks the value of My Health Record in providing them with health information that is otherwise often difficult, if not impossible, to access by other means.
“The comprehensive picture of clinical issues managed by community providers, patients' medication usage and recent imaging and investigation results all add up to better informed and therefore safer, better quality clinical decision making,” he said.
Uploads to My Health Records in WA in October include 21,500 discharge summaries, 590,000 public and GP-referred pathology reports, 54,000 diagnostic imaging reports and 52 Goals of Care documents.
7,500 specialist letters were uploaded by WA Health in October, with this expected to have increased at least four-fold since, with the uploading rolled out to other key major hospitals.
Dr John van Bockxmeer is a WA Country Health Service clinician working in the emergency department of Hedland Health Campus. Hedland is one of the three communities who are participating in the Agency’s Communities of Excellence program.
The program is a national initiative to embed digital health capabilities across targeted communities and use the learnings from these fully connected communities to create a toolkit to enable scalable replication across the country.
Dr van Bockxmeer said My Health Record is a vital part of Australia's digital health transformation.
“I'm thrilled to see local partnerships promoting uptake in regional Western Australia,” he said.
“Working as a clinician at the Hedland Health Campus, I find My Health Record integration helps us work with patients to make the most informed decisions about their care.”
Assistant Senior Medical Officer, Hedland Health Campus, Dr Justin Withnall, said that thanks to the town’s Community of Excellence program, the volume of data being uploaded to My Health Record had increased dramatically.
“This has had a commensurate effect on its utility in clinical practice and has substantially reduced the amount of time spent chasing up information,” he said.
“In the rural setting, having a central repository of specialist letters, reports, medicine history and discharge summaries has proven to be invaluable in the management of many of my patients. This is particularly the case with our itinerant clients who receive care from many providers across different districts and services. It helps to keep everyone on the same page.”
Agency General Manager of Strategic Projects and Delivery, Travis Hodgson, said the Community of Excellence program being run in Hedland was connecting healthcare providers and consumers in a new and revolutionary way.
“From My Health Record to telehealth and electronic prescriptions, digital delivery is making a real difference in people’s lives and health outcomes,” he said.
“This is the way of the future.”
Here is the link:
In 2016 there were about 2200 full time equivalent GPs in WA and about 1.5 times the number of specialists and hospital doctors and specialists – meaning there are at least 5000 practitioners who are potential users of the #myHR.
With 60,000 look ups per month this means that the average doctor is using a look up – at most - about once every 5 days. Hardly a widely used system that doctors are rushing to use regularly!
Much better and more useful is a solution like this I believe!
Project iRAD: expanding the cloud-connected community health network
Tuesday, 15 December, 2020
One of the biggest challenges facing healthcare delivery is the sharing of clinical datasets from multiple services and disparate systems. It is broadly accepted that easy and timely access to patient information across different sites — for example, the patient records of a general practice and a hospital situated in the same community — enables clinicians to be better informed, leading to improved patient health outcomes.
Interoperability in the Australian healthcare system continues to stagnate. Efforts are in place to remedy this but accessibility, timeliness of information and lack of quality data remain significant challenges. Ensuring a continuum of care is a major priority in Australia and around the globe.
South Western Sydney Primary Health Network’s (SWSPHN) innovative Integrated Real-time Active Data (iRAD) interoperability project has enabled healthcare organisations to share patient-consented health records across the continuum of care.
SWSPHN is one of 31 Primary Health Networks (PHNs) across Australia. Funded by the federal government, these non-profit organisations were established to improve patient care and to, generally, make health care in Australia more efficient and effective. They support local doctors, health workers and patients in the communities they serve. Primary health care is generally the first line of service in the Australian healthcare system — typically, general practitioners. One of the major objectives of PHNs is to improve the links between local health services and hospitals.
SWSPHN serves a population of 1.1 million people spread across seven government areas. Its footprint comprises six public hospitals, seven private hospitals, 75 aged-care facilities and more than 400 general practices.
About Project iRAD
In 2017, SWSPHN partnered with Allscripts to develop Project iRAD, which is pioneering open, connected health communities in Australia. The project is committed to achieving better patient outcomes by enabling a diverse range of health service providers to deliver their services as part of a connected community in Australia.
The project is validated by the willingness of patients to participate, with consent recorded on patient and healthcare setting levels.
Allscripts’ role in iRAD is in the delivery of its interoperability platform, dbMotion, available to the Australian market through the cloud via Microsoft Azure. iRAD is the first implementation of dbMotion in the Asia–Pacific region and the first implementation globally on the Microsoft Azure platform.
The dbMotion platform solves the problem of scattered patient health information across many systems and sites. It aggregates and harmonises patient-consented data from Australian primary care clinical information systems, delivering the information clinicians need in a usable and actionable format at the point of care.
iRAD was established to enhance the sharing of patient information, typically when the patient is accessing services in more than one setting — incorporating general practices, outpatient services, antenatal shared care sites, after-hours clinics, residential aged care and palliative care services. iRAD shares a host of patient and clinical information datasets, including:
- demographics
- diagnoses
- medications
- allergies
- pathology
- radiology
- immunisations
- vital signs
- encounters
- surgical procedures
- documents.
SWSPHN CEO Keith McDonald said, “Drawing on extensive consultation with GPs and specialists, we identified a need in the Australian practice setting for an application capable of accurately drawing agreed clinical datasets from a number of disparate systems to provide clinicians with prompt access to a patient’s current health information in one concise view on their desktop without having to leave that patient’s file. Project iRAD’s adaptation of dbMotion for the Australian market does exactly that.”
For clinicians, the benefits of iRAD include access to reliable health information through a simple and intuitive system that aids informed clinical decision-making. The administrative burden is also reduced by saving time and limiting duplication.
iRAD also means that patients no longer have to explain their health issues to multiple clinicians or undergo unnecessary duplicate tests. Patients can be assured that their privacy is respected and safeguarded through the secure hosting of patient information in the cloud through Microsoft Azure. Easier access to information also means that patients with low health literacy or language barriers can benefit.
What’s next for iRAD?
The pilot phase of the iRAD project, which successfully concluded in mid-2020, included a number of innovative general practices and an after-hours service.
Since the completion of the pilot phase, iRAD continues to expand with the intention of becoming Australia’s most comprehensive connected community health network. By the end of August 2020, an additional 30 sites within the south-western Sydney region contributed to the iRAD platform. Within the next six months, a further 40 sites will adopt the iRAD project, including sites from within the Western New South Wales Primary Health Network, demonstrating how easily the solution can scale.
The goal going forward to mid-2021 is to increase the number of participating acute care, aged care and other specialists as well as enabling other PHNs to join.
Here is a link to the release.
https://www.swsphn.com.au/client_images/2232853.html
Here is the description of the system from the Primary Health Network.
https://www.swsphn.com.au/irad
What can you say – a proper real time system that takes consent seriously and is adopted by practitioners because it is useful, and provides information they actually need!
Since it is now clear there are better and more timely ways to proceed – when do you reckon the ADHA will stop it and plan for useful and rational approaches!
That the ADHA is running tenders for API’s to make it better when other better approaches have been trialed and shown to work in Australia is just nonsense I believe.
It is a wonder the ADHA has not tried to shut the project down and block more knowledge of its progress from getting out!
To suggest the #myHealthRecord is “the way of the future” is utter BS IMVHO.
What do you think?
David.
2 comments:
Understand what this chap is trying to say and to some degree why he might be saying it. However lacks delivery and conviction. Comes across rehearsed and less than authentic. Can’t be easy following in the footsteps of those highly skilled in messaging and selling.
Be wise to step their game up as we charge towards the golden age (or is it a shower?)
You might be right Peter Padd. There does seem to be something lacking of late. Lost their mojo I guess. With 2021 changing the landscape again they will need to work hard to keep everyone engaged.
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