As We All Know The myHealth Record Is A Collossal Failure!

This just dropped:

Health portal ‘plagued by incomplete records and poor usability’

Tom Burton Government editor

May 7, 2024 – 10.30pm

Less than 2 per cent of documents in the My Health Record system are being looked at by doctors, with incomplete records, poor interoperability and clunky usability frustrating patient and clinical use of the $2 billion federal portal, according to a new Productivity Commission report.

“Despite major investment in the My Health Record system, patient data is still fragmented and spread across different digital systems maintained by individual healthcare providers,” commissioner and economist Catherine de Fontenay said.

“The usability of MHR [currently described as a ‘shoebox of PDFs’] needs to improve in tandem with its coverage. Government should work to break down or ‘atomise’ data in MHR to make it more useful.”

Telehealth can save nearly $900 million in travel time and waiting room costs, says the Productivity Commission.

“We estimate that making better use of data in electronic medical records systems can save up to $5.4 billion per year by reducing the length of time patients spend in hospital, and $355 million in duplicated tests in the public hospital system alone.”

Dr de Fontenay said artificial intelligence and automation presented a major productivity opportunity for healthcare. She cited studies suggesting 30 per cent of the tasks currently undertaken by the healthcare workforce could be automated, equal to 11 hours a week.

The commission’s report said My Health Record was intended to be a central access point for a patient’s most important health data, but despite an investment of more than $2 billion, it continued to be “plagued by incomplete records and poor usability”.

There are now 23 million records with 1.2 billion documents in the federal portal, but the report said only a fraction were being accessed by clinicians.

“Commission estimates suggest that around 2 per cent of documents uploaded by healthcare providers are viewed by other healthcare providers,” the report says.

“For clinicians who do use MHR, it is not clear that they regularly use it as a source of information.

“Providers are generally more likely to upload information to MHR than they are to actually view it.”

Dr de Fontenay said the lack of take-up of the federal portal was resulting in state governments expanding their own state-based medical reporting systems, including to patients, further fragmenting health information. 

Reduce decision-making time

She said the electronic medical report systems enabled modern digital workflows, reducing decision-making time. This, in turn, shortened hospital admissions stays, yielding an estimated $5.4 billion in savings based on 2020-21 costs.

The report also found virtual health initiatives such as telehealth could save up to $480 million in travel cost times and around $415 million in surgery wait times.

“Telehealth use has exploded since 2020, but uptake of remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics has lagged behind,” Dr de Fontenay said.

With less than a third of specialists and only 6 per cent of aged care providers using the MHR system, the federal government is mandating the uploading of diagnostic imaging and pathology results.

“But getting the information onto the system is only half the challenge – clinicians also need to draw on this valuable information,” the report says.

“If this is to occur, mandatory uploading will need to be accompanied by changes that allow practitioners to efficiently search large volumes of data and display reports in a way that is easy to read and accessible.”

Dr de Fontenay also picked up previous recommendations to have health information presented in formats that enable easy searching rather than PDFs, which are problematic to search.

“Shifting towards storing data in an atomised format would help. Atomisation would involve storing individual pieces of information at their most basic level, rather than in a format that is more difficult to reduce,” she said.

She said the greatest potential benefits of this change would be realised if MHR information was capable of being used by other digital systems.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/health-portal-plagued-by-incomplete-records-and-poor-usability-20240506-p5fpeo

So tell us something we didn't already know!!

David.