Verbal consent to bulk billing will be acceptable for the next 12 months, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has confirmed.
Just eight working days out from the go-live date, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has made significant adjustments to the incoming 1 July Medicare assignment of benefit rules.
This development was not entirely unexpected; both the AMA’s Dr Danielle McMullen and the RACGP’s Dr Michael Wright have told The Medical Republic over the last week that the department was working urgently to respond to GP concerns about the rules.
The concessions that the Department has made are as follows:
- Verbal assignment of benefit will be accepted in all settings until July 2027.
- Enduring assignment of benefit provisions will commence from July 2026, rather than April 2027.
- Compliance activity will not begin until all regulatory changes are in place.
“We have heard the concerns raised by stakeholders on these changes. We want to make accessing healthcare easier not harder, for all Australians,” a government spokesperson told TMR.
“In response, we will make regulatory amendments so that verbal consent will be available for a year.
“In addition, new regulations will further remove administrative burden for patients and providers in Residential Aged Care Homes, Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services, and for patients registered with MyMedicare.
“I have asked the department to look at other regulatory and legislative options to further reduce the administrative burden on both healthcare providers and patients during this 12-month period.
“I want to thank NACCHO, the RACGP, Ageing Australia, the AMA, the MSIA and other stakeholders who have continued to work constructively with us on this.”
The enduring assignment of benefit option will only be available for MyMedicare-registered patients, residential aged care patients and patients attending an Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation.
Patients at Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations will be allowed to register their enduring assignment of benefit at multiple sites.
Until today, the changes to assignment of benefit rules would have forced GPs to obtain and store a physical or digital signature from each patient recording their consent to be bulk billed before or after every single occasion of care.
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This would have needed to be collected before the GP or practice could submit the patient’s claim to Medicare.
There were particular concerns for how this may affect patients in aged care and disability settings who did not have the capacity to consent but may not have a next of kin available to sign on their behalf.
The new rules will also allow clinics to collect consent prior to a consult and to collect consent digitally rather than physically. These components are unaffected by today’s updates.
While the method of collecting patient consent has been updated to include verbal assignment, the requirement to store evidence of that consent for two years does not appear to be affected.
“You still have to keep [a record of the assignment], although we think most practices – if they were already collecting it digitally – a number were storing it anyway,” AMA president Dr Danielle McMullen told TMR.
“Anecdotally, our practice has been storing it for some time because it comes through to the patient record, so that is a more technical issue.
“It’s those factors that software providers now have a bit of extra time to play with, because verbal consent is still an option.
“If you’re, for whatever reason, unable to store that information in the short term, you could take verbal consent and store the record that verbal consent was made.”
Dr McMullen urged the GPs and practices which had already made arrangements to be compliant with the new rules to continue business as usual.
“If you’re already ready with some digital solutions and you’re comfortable using them, feel free to continue,” she said.
“For those who weren’t quite ready yet, this buys more time. And for those who kind of hadn’t caught the memo yet or were still trying to work out how they would cope with this, again, this buys some time and means that we can work with the different styles of practice, can all find a solution that hopefully meets the needs of them and their patients.”
That the DoHDA made the updates to assignment of benefit rules at all was down to sustained and “assertive” advocacy, Dr McMullen said.
“People will still be frustrated, and that’s understandable,” she said.
‘[Changes like these] disrupt what was already a tenuous kind of trust with government programs and are an example of why we continually push government to have adequate lead time and consult deeply, so that we’re not all stuck in a last-minute rush with eight days to go.”
RACGP president Dr Michael Wright thanked the GPs who had raised their concerns about the incoming changes.
“I really want to thank all the RACGP members who’ve written to me and the college pointing out the practical issues with what was proposed,” he told TMR.
“I want to thank the minister and the department for listening to those concerns and working with the college to come up with solutions.”
The Department itself had not made an official update at time of writing.
