This appeared last week:
The 3.5 million reasons why the Australian Digital Health Agency should be happy
Even the agency's most ardent critic says it is winning when it comes to e-scripts
29th March 2021
The Australian Digital Health Agency loves a statistic.
We saw this best with the My Health Record.
But despite some of the numbers being astronomically large — such as the 2.7 billion documents uploaded to the system - often they weren’t too flattering when put in the correct context.
For instance, it turns out that most of those documents are no more than a dump of patients' MBS/PBS claims data rather than documents of immediate clinical value.
However, its latest stat, not related to My Health Record and slightly smaller in scale, does seem immediately impressive.
Some 95% of PBS-approved pharmacies are now accepting e-scripts.
The first e-script was dispensed in Anglesea, Victoria, back in May last year by local GP Dr David Corbet.
It was hoped they would reduce transcription errors and curb doctor-shopping by patients who claim to have lost their paper script.
In the following months, the major GP software makers quickly turned on the e-script option across the rest of Australia.
But then, just as quickly, GPs realised pharmacy software makers hadn’t followed suit.
One practice found only two of 11 local pharmacies were accepting e-scripts even though they were meant to be in an e-prescribing ‘test bed’.
So the fact it’s now up to 95% of pharmacies is genuinely impressive.
And added to that, more than 3.5 million e-scripts have been written by 12,000 GPs, according to the agency.
It’s still a fraction of the 200 million PBS scripts written every year, but after 10 months, with many pharmacies coming online late, it’s certainly no disaster.
Could this be the health-policy equivalent of a living thylacine — an eHealth success story?
More discussing my comment here:
As derived from here:
https://aushealthit.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-news-on-eprescribing-continues-to.html
All I can do is to thank Anthony for the mention and I can only hope that it encourages the ADHA to take notice of a few of the other suggestions I have made (as have many others) over the years.
David.
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