When a major cloud based aged care medication management provider integrates with our major GP PMS early next year about 50% of aged care homes will become more or less interoperable with 70% of general practice. That’s big.
In yet another major integration announcement at this year’s BP Premier Summit in Brisbane, one of our market-leading aged care medication management providers, BESTMED, has announced it has become a BP Premier partner with an intention to integrate its medication management application fully with BP by early 2026.
Based on the penetration of BESTMED into the aged care sector, the integration has the potential to create seamless two-way communication of the all-important medication management charts of patients in around 50% of all aged care homes in the country with at least 70% of local GPs and practices.
That represents a potentially huge leap forward on a key pain point in the government’s interoperability agenda.
At this point of time BESTMED has around 7000 unique GP users and can create potential access for these users to about 110,000 aged care home residents across the country.
When details of the integration were announced to the summit over the weekend, the overwhelming feeling from the GP audience was describe as “how soon?”, a reaction that emphasises just how much GPs would like to streamline the connection between a local aged care home and their practice.
There are two key blockers to general practice being able to do a lot more work with local aged care homes in their area:
- Most of the clinical work a GP does in the aged care premise has to be done on clinical care or medication management systems within the home. At present those applications don’t talk to any GP patient management systems so GPs have to rekey nearly everything back into their practice PMS in order to keep contiguous records.
- The funding signals for GPs to undertake aged care work are generally not strong enough to create a good enough ROI to offset the hassle and time GPs have to put in to service their local RACHs on an ad hoc basis.
Some specialist GP services have arisen that with scale have tended to overcome the ROI problem, but such services are few and far between, so overall, aged care servicing by GPs has remained fragmented and eclectic at best.
The announcement of this integration may herald the beginning of a new era of far more comprehensive interoperability between aged care and the general practice sector.
Once the application is up and running in early 2026 it is entirely likely that a lot of practices, in particular the corporates, will look at the potential of establishing scaled up servicing of local RACHs. That might start to shift the dial on the meaningful interaction between general practice and RACHs.
What could add to this momentum are the obvious utilities such an integration would have for the various GP telehealth providers; the incentive it would provide for practices to look at their own ability to provide telehealth to their local RACHs on top of physical visits by their GPs; and plans by the federal government to incentivise GPs to service aged care more via new block funding initiatives.
BESTMED’s rise to prominence within the aged care community has been largely below the waterline until now.
It was started only 10 years ago by a pair of frustrated pharmacists who had contracts to manually service about 50 RACHs with medication services and wanted to streamline their problem using technology. The group’s timing was good. It quickly evolved into a cloud-based medication management application provider that rapidly grew share of the national RACH market.
The application already connects via RESTful APIs and FHIR based APIs to all but two of the major aged care clinical and bed management applications – representing about 60% of all RACHs – and each of the major pharmacy dispensing systems.
Its connection to internal systems means that there is little rekeying internally between the key management systems in an RACH with the applications that talk, and that there is far more ability to provide continuity of patient management when a patient leaves an RACH for hospital, returns, or starts anew.
BESTMED CEO, Phil Offer, who is a past CEO of Medical Director, told The Medical Republic, that general practice was the next logical stage of interoperability for the application after connection to internal systems and pharmacy.
“When the doctor visits the home, they will spend a large part of their time in our software, doing the medications and writing their progress notes,” said Mr Offer.
“And then they essentially have to copy and paste that into the Best Practice, both to keep their medication list up to date and to have their patient notes up to date.
“At the age care home, we have integrations with all but two of the clinical care systems to push those progress notes into their systems.
“This [integration] will allow us now to do that with Best Practice.”
Mr Offer said that in recent surveys with their GP users, the number one thing they wanted was seamless integration back into their PMS system so they could save all that time and reduce re-entry errors.
He also said that fragmentation of medication management was the number one complaint identified by the Aged Care Royal Commission.
In just three years it looks like a lot of the aged care software community has pivoted quickly to cloud-based tech stacks in order to quickly solve some of these problems, something which hasn’t really yet happened in general practice.
Related
One reason why RACHs have leaned into cloud is probably its ability to manage data in a multi tenancy arrangement.
Mr Offer said that his sector looked nothing like it did three years ago.
“The government galvanised around the Royal Commission in terms of interoperability, medication charts and software capability,” he said.
“[We] need to have software systems that are able to sustainably meet the need for the legislation that’s being introduced.
“We always talk about interoperability.
“Our purpose is to be able to do that. We’ve got to connect up to three groups. We connected all of the pharmacy dispensing systems. We also provide the packing software in that sector, and now most of the [RACH] clinical systems now integrate with us.
“The doctor piece was really the next one that we were we’re now investing into be able to connect up”.
And what about the hospital sector?
Mr Offer said that hospitals were particularly important because of the potential for confusion when either a RACH resident was sent to hospital or vice a versa.
In this respect BESTMED already talked to the My Health Record so hospitals did have a means of capturing the medication record of a RACH patient upon admission, said Mr Offer.
At the moment the other way around still remains fairly manual on the part of a hospitals.
Most homes rely on a hospital providing a few days of what they’ve prescribed to get an initial idea of medications and then on the paperwork that comes with a patient.
Mr Offer said this was the next vital piece in the aged care interoperability puzzle for his group.
