Unconnected practices are being told to ask their patients to share results from their My Health app.
Practice managers have been advised to get on board with sharing by default functionality, as consumers drive engagement with My Health Record to the tune of 1.2 million views a week, and providers upload 3.8 million reports a week.
That’s despite the absence of specific rules or a start date for the sharing by default mandate.
Officials from the Australian Digital Health Agency briefed practice managers yesterday, telling practices which were not yet connected to My Health Record:
“The quickest and easiest way that you can find information for your patient is just simply asking them to use their use the [My Health] app.
“Over 80% of you stated … that you spent significant time trying to get information for your patient that you don’t have access to,” said the ADHA’s Nicola Graham.
“With the app, your patients can show you the latest blood tests they’ve had, or the last x-ray that was taken, and if needed, you can even see the location where the test was done, and you can contact that practice directly for additional information, and in the case of radiology, for the images for that particular scan.
“If you don’t have access to My Health Record through your clinical information system, ask your patients, get them to have a look at it in their app, and they can then share it with you from their app.”
The major changes of concern to practices include:
- healthcare providers do not need to obtain permission prior to uploading information to a person’s My Health Record when they are providing care and services to a patient;
- if a patient requests that a particular document is not uploaded to their record, such as a pathology or a diagnostic imaging report, healthcare providers must comply with such requests;
- in addition, patients can restrict access to or remove information contained in their record;
- patients can also set controls by restricting access to the specific documents in their My Health Record by setting a code called a “limited document access code”;
- pathology results will be available to the patient immediately, with some exceptions: what has been determined as a “sensitive” test will retain a five-day delay – histopathology and genetic testing are considered sensitive at this time;
- radiology reports will retain a five-day delay, with the exception of x-rays of limbs, which will be available immediately, subject to “technical specifications”.
Announcement of the exposure draft for the specific rules surrounding the sharing by default legislation for pathology and radiology was “imminent”, said Ms Graham.
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At the AIDH’s HIC2025 in Melbourne last week, Simon Cleverley, assistant secretary for the digital health branch of the DoHDA, said the rules were expected to be in place before Christmas, with a view to being in place by the end of the calendar year.
“We are already turning our mindset towards what comes next,” said Mr Cleverley.
“We are already starting to turn our minds towards general practice and how we work with general practice and engage with them about the sorts of information that might come next.
“We’re doing a lot of work [with Sparked] around chronic condition management plans and health assessments.
“You can anticipate that those would be the sorts of things that we see coming online next – probably one of the biggest, most fundamental changes that we’ve seen in healthcare, in my view, in the last decade.”
