It Is Hard Not To Be A Little Frustrated When One Reads This From Across “The Ditch!”

This appeared a few days ago from NZ.

HealthOne to increase access for patients and providers

Thursday, 4 February 2021  

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

HealthOne is working to expand access to the shared care record system by providing an API for accredited patient portal providers and making it web-based.

HealthOne brings together and electronically stores health information about a person -including such information as GP records, prescribed and dispensed medications and test results - and covers everybody living in the South Island.

The records are accessed more than 300,000 times every month by people involved in a patient’s clinical care, up from around 130,000 in July 2018.

There are more than 27,000 active account holders for the system and it is accessed via the Connected Health Network, a Ministry of Health encrypted network for the health sector.

HealthOne programme manager Nigel Kingshott says this means users have to be able to access that network, which comes at a cost, to be able to view the shared records.

“This limits who can get access as they have to be on that connection, so we are looking at enabling HealthOne on the web securely, without the connected health connection requirement,” he says.

This is probably around six-months away, but will be “ground-breaking” in providing access to a larger group of organisations involved in health care, he adds.

The HealthOne team is also building an API (Application Programming Interface) to allow patient portal providers to access information stored in the shared record. 

Key to this is identity management, to ensure the person requesting access to the record is the right person, and the team is working with the Ministry of Health’s digital identity team on a proof of concept around this.

More here:

https://www.hinz.org.nz/news/550549/HealthOne-to-increase-access-for-patients-and-providers.htm

The interesting thing about this system is that is seems that despite the cost and pretty rigorous restrictions on access that the information is seen as being sufficiently useful and valuable is assisting care that it is being used. (Note the population being served is only about 1..2 Million).

HealthOne was accessed by 500,000 or so clinicians per month and the #myHR as accessed (as of Dec 2020) just 550,000 times by GPs! A difference of a factor of 25 times or so! Maybe the ADHA should call HealthOne and get some pointers on how to be useful!!!

You can read all the details here:

https://healthone.org.nz/home/about-healthone

Yet again it seems we have a lot to learn from overseas!

If you are going to so a Shared Care Record you might as well do it properly! (or give it up and save he money!)

David.