Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Friday, February 03, 2023

MyHR Alert - The New Health Minister Has Drunk The MyHR Kool-Aid.

 In comments made an hour or so ago he indicates that it is planned to update and improve the MyHR system to save and enhance the Medicare System.

The details will be very interesting!

You can read the full report here:

Strengthening Medicare Taskforce Report (13 pages)

https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/strengthening-medicare-taskforce-report?language=en

Here is the key paragraph!

Strengthening Medicare Taskforce report

Page 9 

Recommendations:

Modernise My Health Record to significantly increase the health information available to individuals and their health care professionals, including by requiring ‘sharing by default’ for private and public practitioners and services, and make it easier for people and their health care teams to use at the point of care.

Details are clearly to follow!

David.

8 comments:

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

"Modernise My Health Record to significantly increase the health information available to individuals ..."

They just don't get it.

It is called My Health Record because it is under the control of the individual. It is totally reliant on the individual to ensure that it contains something useful. Even then it is limited in what it can contain.

A bunch of recent test results, a minimalist Shared Health Summary and the occasional discharge summary hardly make a health record.

Anonymous said...

This won’t make seeing a GP more affordable or provide the GP compensation for a service delivered

The Minister needs to wake up - people want to be treated not tweeted.

Andrew McIntyre said...

These sort of pronouncements are part of a potentially civilization ending delusion that you can pretend everything is going to work at a political level and the public service will make it seem that way, with the cash starved compliant media all to happy to go along in return for handouts that they now depend on for survival.

We have seen and continue to see that with the Covid disaster, of which the AMA is a compliant but clueless partner, just like the talking heads in the AMA support the eHealth initiatives without the slightest technical understanding of what's going on at a technical level. Unfortunately what's going on at a technical level is purely smoke and mirrors.

For a time I was a participant in a committee with pathologists and ADHA and some software vendors to try and align the (non atomic pdf) pathology reports with slightly different report titles. The software vendor insisted this be done purely on the text of the report title which is nonsensical as you have longstanding report titles which reflect the slightly differing contents of the report. eg FBC/ESR vs FBC or Electrolytes vs ELFTS which indicate to a clinician what's in the report even if the analytes only partially overlap. This is easily done using the Snomed-CT hierarchy and simple ISA relationships and you can call it anything you like. I presented how this could be done to align eg All reports with "Electrolytes" or all reports with an "ESR" in them.

I was told that was rocket science and it had to be done with text and the "Solution" was to call all biochemistry "General Biochemistry" which is the silliest solution imaginable. You look at a patients record trying to find a eg B12 level and it could be under one of thousands of "General Biochemistry" reports, never mind that the actual results is buried in a non machine readable pdf document. Image over time patients accumulating thousands of pathology reports that require a human to look at every one to work out if the file even contains any B12 levels. That makes the record useless, its no an electronic health record, its a big bundle of electronic paper. In the 90s I was frustrated with big bundles of actual paper, but electronic paper offers nothing more than faxing paper records and collecting all the silly tickbox forms that have become part of the health care process these days makes information overload certain.

You need to be able to show all the B12 levels/Electrolytes etc cumulatively and graphing and providing decision support to be an actual functioning electronic health record.

My input was not welcome, so I dropped out of the meetings. Its my observation that no one in these meetings knows anything anymore, but I am sure the process is well documented. That documentation will be useful only when they want to remake "Yes Minister" As I see it there is zero chance that My Health record will ever be of any use, but will create lots of bullshit jobs...

G. Carter said...

sharing by default - bold Minister, the ADHA can even work out how to exchange let alone share.

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

‘sharing by default’

Classic scope creep. Opt-in -> Opt-out -> ‘sharing by default’

We don't know a lot about what they plan, but changing access to ‘sharing by default’ is probably only the first step. At the moment if you don't want a MyHR you can decide not to have one, or if you already have one, delete it.

Will the future be "you must have a MyHR"?

Followed by "You must make sure it is up to date"?

Followed by "Every week, or if you have a change in your health condition, you must update your status or you will not qualify for Medicare."?

Emma Green said...

It is telling how this time round no one seems energised one way or the other regarding MyHR or ADHA. The current CEO and co have successfully reach 50 shades or bland.

Anonymous said...

No updates on the blog for some time. Is everything ok David?

Anonymous said...

Hope you are well David. Thanks for the blog all these years