Has The ADHA Worked Out Just How The Provider Connect Australia System Will Fit With Other Service Directories?

This appeared last week from the ADHA.

Provider Connect Australia - helping healthcare providers stay connected

Published 25 June 2021

Healthcare provider organisations around the country can now update information about their healthcare services and practitioners in just one place using Provider Connect Australia, eliminating the need to keep multiple directories up-to-date manually.

Provider Connect Australia is new technology that maintains the accuracy of healthcare service and practitioner contact details and will be rolled out nationally. It is expected to achieve economic benefits of more than $30 million per year by 2025.

When healthcare provider organisations update their contact details in the Provider Connect Australia service, this automatically sends their new details to nominated hospitals, pathology and radiology services, public service directories, secure messaging providers and more.

Australian Digital Health Agency CEO Amanda Cattermole said Provider Connect Australia would drive greater interoperability and adoption of secure messaging across the Australian healthcare system and provide benefits to both patients and health professionals.

“By providing this national service, the Agency can improve the quality and reliability of healthcare service details in directories and other services, including Medicare, and significantly reduce the administrative burden on healthcare organisations,” Ms Cattermole said.

Accurate and reliable information about healthcare services is a key foundation to support a digitally connected healthcare system, including secure messaging and interoperability. 

“Secure messaging is a key strategic priority under the National Digital Health Strategy and the Agency is delivering this new feature of the national digital health infrastructure to enable healthcare providers to easily find each other to securely share patient information,” Ms Cattermole said.

Healthcare provider organisations have previously been required to complete between 10 and 20 different paper or online forms to notify different parts of the healthcare system whenever their service or practitioner information changes.  

This is a substantial red-tape burden that leads to inaccurate and out-of-date information across the sector, impacting efficiency and quality of care.

A trial of the service in Northern NSW in 2020 found 99 per cent of participating practitioner records held in the Local Health District address book were out of date. The Provider Connect Australia service meant updates were made quickly and seamlessly, giving healthcare organisations more time with patients and less time on administration.

“The objective is to improve the efficiency of administrative processes for publishers and subscribers managing their data and help provide prompt, safe and seamless patient care across settings and providers,” Ms Cattermole said.

The benefits to patient care will also be significant across a range of healthcare settings. For example, having the most up-to-date details is essential to ensuring hospital discharge summaries, including treatment plans and progress notes, get to the right person as quickly as possible. This helps the patient’s GP to provide the best possible post-hospital care.

Dr Steve Hambleton, a General Practitioner and the Agency’s Chief Clinical Adviser said: “Provider Connect Australia will deliver efficiencies for practice support staff who will only have to update any changes in practice information once and will increase confidence at the point of care that all of the incoming information about patients will be there, and that outgoing address books are complete and up-to-date.

“I look forward to using it in my practice.”

Here is a link to the release:

https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/recent-media-releases/provider-connect-australia-helping-healthcare-providers-stay-connected

This system is the child of a system announced almost a year ago:

Digital assistant improves secure transfer of patient information

Monday, 13 July, 2020

In a world where consumers can no longer be a conduit for delivering a referral letter or test result to another provider, and where postal services are over capacity, an up-to-date electronic registry is essential.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how important technology is to allow healthcare providers to communicate with each other securely and immediately, but out-of-date contact details pose as a spanner in the works. If information regarding healthcare services or practitioners is incorrect, medical documents and information cannot be sent from one healthcare provider to another.

To solve this problem, the Australian Digital Health Agency has built a Service Registration Assistant (SRA) that 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, prompting automatic send out 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.

“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,” GP and Agency Clinical Reference Lead Dr Steve Hambleton said.

Initial results from a trial of the SRA in Northern NSW have 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.

Australian Digital Health Agency Interim CEO 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).

NCPHN CEO 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.”

NNSWLHD Chief Executive 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.

The secure messaging process

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 NNSWLHD and the secure messaging service providers need accurate and up-to-date information about the GP, so they know where to deliver the secure message. However, when a GP 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:

https://www.hospitalhealth.com.au/content/technology/article/digital-assistant-improves-secure-transfer-of-patient-information-1530465839

There is coverage of the initiative here:

1 July 2021

Provider connection project would save practices a bomb

ADHA

By Jeremy Knibbs

When I first read about the latest iteration of Australian Digital Health Agency’s Provider Connect Australia (PCA) project, I was actually impressed.

It appeared that the agency had iterated its way out of a deep bog (the project is a reboot of a much older project with a different main goal that was probably never achievable) and onto a path that that is a practical and meaningful solution to a problem that every practice manager in the country is hugely frustrated with: all the paperwork that has to be processed, digitally and otherwise, when a new health professional starts in your practice, or one leaves.

What if you had to fill out just one digital form when a new doctor started at your practice, rather than the 15 or so you currently have to fill out and send to 15 different service providers? Even better, what if your patient management system, which captures nearly all the same information, was integrated to the PCA, so that once you’ve entered your new doctor information your PMS, you have very little left to do to finish your normally cumbersome sign-on paperwork job? And what if the system did a whole lot of validity checks on your data which helps protect your practice, and the system?

From a practice manager’s perspective, that’s the current main goal of the PCA project being run by the ADHA: to capture all the important data of a new starter just once and feed it all via this connection service to all the important providers that doctor and your practice will need to interact with (Medicare, Veterans Affairs, Indemnity Insurers, Workcover, Accident cover, secure messaging providers, booking engines, any number of doctor sub directories and so on).

The agency says it has completed it’s “proof of concept” phase with North Coast Primary Health Network and the Northern NSW Local Health District and that it is now ready to move to a more operational phase over the coming year. It estimates it could be starting to onboard providers as early as October.

There are pages more of information here:

https://wildhealth.net.au/provider-connection-project-would-save-practices-a-bomb/

There is also coverage here:

https://www.healthcareit.com.au/article/australia-rolling-out-online-healthcare-provider-directory

To me, as far as I can understand, the whole system is about being able to change the contact details of a practice and have all those services which are connected to that practice all updated. So that means pathology providers, specialists and hospitals and the like can provide their reports, discharge summaries and the like to the correct practice recipient.

This is clearly an attempt to provide what amounts to the correct secure messaging “end point” to allow a secure messaging flow to operate – presumably bi-directionally.

In the past Secure Messaging Providers have typically provided an address book with a look-up facility so the GP, say, can look up the local path practice, find the right address and send a test request electronically and have the results returned in similar fashion. Sadly, at this stage, each messaging provider has their own service directory which can mean the need to look up – and maintain information on – multiple directories / providers. (Telstra, Medical Objects, HealthLink etc.) A while ago I seem to recall HealthDirect was hoping to provide a national end point location service but I am not sure where that is at – if anywhere. (Anyone know?)

Clearly what the ADHA are wanting to create is one national connection system with presumably needs just one look-up to send a request etc.

Given it has taken a year from the SRA trial till this announcement I am not expecting a rapid movement from the status quo to the desired future state and I really suspect this might turn out to take longer and be more complex than is presently envisaged.

I do wonder it the PCA system intended to be the national ‘end point location service’ we need?

How much confidence do you have that the implementation of Provider Connect will be smooth / reasonably prompt and actually work at scale?

David.