A new Best Practice integration will allow GPs to submit PBS authority scripts without having to go via HPOS.
Practice management software vendor Best Practice has debuted a new feature in partnership with AI scribe Lyrebird which will streamline what is one of – if not the most – commonly cited GP admin bugbear: PBS authority approvals.
The integration, which had been in beta-testing for some time but came online for all Best Practice Premier users today, enabled GPs to create, save and synchronise authority scripts within the program.
This eliminated the need to either call the authority hotline or go online via PRODA.
It also allowed users to sign into PRODA once per day; the current online portal for authority scripts timed out after five minutes idle and required a two-step verification login.
Lyrebird clinical product lead Dr Hamish Graham, who was on the development team and was also one of the GPs to beta-test the plugin, estimated that writing an authority script went from taking five minutes to about 20 seconds.
“The things that you have to enter into PRODA every time, like the Medicare number, what medication it is, the dose, the quantity … we can avoid you having to type all of that, because we can retrieve that information from Best Practice and have it pre-filled for you,” he told The Medical Republic.
“We can do all that pre-filling because we [Lyrebird] have shown to Best Practice that we can be trusted with that information.
“And then the other part is actually logging into PRODA itself. There’s been, for a long time now, the option of getting your approval either via the phone line or by logging into PRODA online, and I almost exclusively use PRODA online because I find that more convenient, but it’s still annoying.
“No matter what you do – and I use a password manager, so that stuff will autofill for me – but I still have got to get a [multi-factor authentication] token every time … and I think that’s the part the GPs find the most annoying.”
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The Lyrebird Best Practice integration used “refresh tokens”, which prevented the PRODA session from going idle.
According to Dr Graham, the government signed off on the feature, including the refresh token aspect.
“I have to admit I was a tiny bit sceptical on the feature because I was like, how often do I really do an authority script; maybe a couple of times a day? How life changing is this really going to be for me?” he said.
“But the experience of actually using it – I am a complete convert. Maybe it wasn’t happening that often, but it’s such a high friction thing that you have to do, and to make that so easy feels magical.
“It feels a bit like using an AI scribe again for the first time.”
Dr Graham also said that Lyrebird didn’t store any of the patient information used for the interactions and that no patient data was used for training its AI models.
