This appeared last week:
CareVision Working to Integrate My Health Record for NDIS Aged Care and Community Care
Apr 4, 2024 | Company News, Home Care Software, Home Care Technology
The Australian government recommends the universal adoption of My Health Record by the aged care sector. My Health Record provides authorised healthcare professionals with access to a patient’s key health information. CareVision is working towards integrating My Health Record as it provides many benefits:
- Saves time in the transfer of care especially in emergencies
- Quick and reliable verification and validation of clinical information
- It helps in avoiding the duplication of tests as well as diagnostic imaging
- Improves the continuity of patient or client care
The information included in My Health Record is uploaded by healthcare professionals, including doctors and pharmacists. Some of the clinical documents that will be accessed include:
- shared health summaries
- vaccination and immunisation information
- prescription and dispense records
- discharge summaries
- transfer of care information
- radiology and pathology results.
It is also possible for the actual patients or their family members and carers to upload advanced care documents.
Here is the link:
The real question here is just what is the actual usage level on the myHR and how many GPs are actually filling it in as each patient visits.
It is now a little over a year since this commentary appeared, and it appears usage has rather flatlined or worse since then.
My Health Record is meant to empower patients – but with little useful information stored, is it worth saving?
Published: March 3, 2023 6.08am AEDT
Author
Senior Lecturer in Law, The University of Melbourne
Australia’s My Health Record is a national, integrated electronic record, intended to overcome the problem of having personal health information “siloed” in different systems.
People can access their own My Health Record via MyGov or an app. Any of their treating health professionals can access it, too.
My Health Record can hold various past information, including a shared health summary, records of health conditions, allergies and medications, summaries of cancer treatment, test and scan results, hospital discharge notes, vaccination records, organ donation choices, and notes entered by patients themselves.
But is the system actually being used? Why is it, when people access their My Health Record, they often find little helpful information? Earlier this year, Health Minister Mark Butler promised an overhaul as part of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce. But what needs to happen for it to be finally fit for purpose?
Lots more here:
The current usage statistics are found here:
https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/my-health-record/statistics
You will note there has been no update since January, 2024 and that people looking at their information has basically flatlined or dropped since January 2023. Practitioner usage also seems to have flatlined or also declined.
As far as I can tell active usage by GPs of the myHR is stable to declining and the huge pile of historical documents (many years old) just pile up! Any sign of the promised improvements?
It is of note that even the ADHA has stopped updating the stats in the last 3 months – what does that tell you?
The huge “white elephant” status of the myHR seems to be confirmed.
David.
I have a My Health Record. Therefore I am a statistic. I have accessed it from time to time to monitor what changes have occurred and what new information has been added. Therefore I am a multiple statistic.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as a clinician and as a patient, I have never once found any information that is current, easy to access,, accurate or useful. I often wonder why Dr Steve Hambleton as Clinical Consultant to the ADHA can claim that he uses the MHR a lot and finds it very useful in the management of his patients.
I am not sure how you could claim those benefits without stating the most important:
ReplyDeleteMarketing the benefits of the My Health Record ensures we gain access to federal funding, conferences and other lucrative opportunities.
My only other take away is the Carevision platform must not live up to its feature-rich hype if it needs the Feds Health Record to achieve what it claims its platform delivers
$3b on MyHR and this problem has yet to be solved, even though that was the objective of the system - to increase access and reduce data fragmentation.
ReplyDeleteCalls to improve 'archaic' medical record transfer system between cross-border hospitals
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-11/calls-to-improve-cross-border-medical-record-transfer-system-nsw/103428242
In short:
* Electronic health record systems currently do not allow patient information to be transferred between NSW and the ACT.
* Health professionals say the old-school system is wasting resources and putting lives at risk.
* What's next? Plans for the new single digital patient record (SDPR) to be introduced in 2029 do not currently address the issue.
When south coast NSW resident John Wilkinson was transferred between hospitals after being treated for heart failure, he did not realise his medical history would not come with him.
The 82-year-old Batemans Bay man, who has a rare immune disease and reduced lung capacity, was a patient at Canberra Hospital.
His scans and X-rays were left there when he was moved to Moruya Hospital on the NSW far south coast.
The Southern NSW Local Health District (SNSWLHD), where Mr Wilkinson resides, uses a secure electronic medical record system that can transfer a patient's information to other hospitals within the health district.
However, it does not transfer information to other health districts in the state, or outside NSW.
As is the case in many border towns, receiving a higher level of care requires crossing state boundaries.
Patients from across south-east NSW are often transferred to Canberra when they require a larger hospital.
Mr Wilkinson was rushed to Canberra Hospital to be treated for heart failure.(ABC News: Matt Roberts)
Although the hospitals are only two hours' drive apart, health professionals in Batemans Bay are unable to access the online health records of patients from Canberra.
Instead, standard procedure is to keep records printed out in a folder which is tucked under the patient's pillow, taped to their chest or wedged behind the paramedic's chair for the patient's transfer.
"It's a very archaic system," Mr Wilkinson said.
"In Moruya they had to run fresh tests and scans because they couldn't access the Canberra ones, and it happened in reverse when I went to Canberra Hospital.
Mr Wilkinson said he became concerned those treating him would not know which drugs he was taking.
"They may have given me something that was incompatible with what I'd already had. There's a risk there if the record isn't immediately to hand," he said.
"It makes you wonder, sometimes, am I going to have my leg amputated because I'm up there with a sore eye?"
A Eurobodalla nurse who spoke on the condition of anonymity said such cases were all too common in areas around Canberra.
"Quite often the receiving department in Canberra Hospital would ring us up and say, 'There's no notes with this patient' or, 'There's details missing', and that's a very bad thing when you're transferring patients," the nurse said.
"It's basically just an envelope put on someone's chest. It's possible information could be lost, or it could just not be included in the first place."
The nurse said the need to print health records added extra pressure for staff, who were already managing patients, and could result in huge delays.
"Ambulances have been waiting in the dock, waiting for a transfer while we wait for a hard copy to be printed off of imaging results," the nurse said.
"You can have little problems like the printer is out of toner. A whole bunch of those small little things adding up, and it can be catastrophic in the end."
etc, etc, depressingly etc.
Development and deployment of best-of-breed systems and specific domain specialised healthIT applications have been hugely advantageous over the last few decades in improving health service delivery and integrating fragmented silos of health data in their specific domains.
ReplyDeleteHowever, across the wider more generalised health care environment the opposite has occurred.
Overly enthusiastic development of statewide and nationwide systems focussed on the seamless integration of multiple general medical, specialist, community, aged care, hospital, and other domains, centered around the patient medical record and the patient healthcare summary, has created a vastly more fragmented, disintegrated, disrupted health system which is becoming increasingly more dangerous for the consumer as a patient, the health practitioner and other service providers.
I foresee this situation deteriorating further with the thrust of AI and the failure of Government Health System Bureaucrats to appreciate the problem.
@April 14, 2024 5:47 PM
ReplyDelete"I foresee this situation deteriorating further with the thrust of AI and the failure of Government Health System Bureaucrats to appreciate the problem."
Yes.
Governments and Health IT proponents do not understand how dynamic tests, diagnostics and general medical care is.
Building systems is just the start. Keeping them current is much harder because now they have legacy systems to cope with. The costs of health IT maintenance will escalate and drown other costs because the old systems will become dangerous.
Have a read of these two news items, both about ISIS, 9 years apart.
Hockey flags billion-dollar Centrelink mainframe replacement
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/hockey-flags-billion-dollar-centrelink-mainframe-replacement-383698
Gov writes off Centrelink calculation engine project after $191m spent
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/gov-writes-off-centrelink-calculation-engine-project-after-191m-spent-598412