The government’s plan to bring telehealth providers into line is a sound one, the AMA says, but it needs to sit alongside other measures.
Cleaning up the online-only telehealth clinic sector will take more than just a national medicines record, the AMA tells the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing in a newly-issued submission.
Announced earlier this year, DoHDA is working on a set of reforms to address doctor shopping.
One part of this will be the introduction of a national medicines record, combining e-prescribing technology, My Health Record, and the Active Script list to ensure both prescribers and dispensers have a full picture of what medicines a patient is on.
The second part is a new requirement for online telehealth providers to upload medicines-related information to My Health Record. DoHDA’s goal is to have this up and running by the end of the calendar year.
In its submission to the DoHDA consultation on this second component, the AMA said timely, accurate, and clinically meaningful information had become increasingly important in a fragmented care landscape.
“This reform is necessary because the health system is now dealing with prescribing models that were not contemplated when many regulatory, clinical governance and information-sharing arrangements were designed,” the submission read.
“[Direct-to-consumer] and single-issue online prescribing services can offer convenience and access, but they may also fragment care, weaken communication with a patient’s usual general practitioner … and leave other treating practitioners without visibility of medicines that affect clinical decision-making.”
The association said it saw requirements for online prescribing services to share medicines-related information to My Health Record as a “minimum safety requirement”, rather than a “complete answer to unsafe online prescribing”.
“This reform must be framed as part of a broader clinical governance response to increasingly fragmented prescribing,” the AMA wrote.
“Uploading a prescription to MHR may improve visibility, but it does not discharge a prescriber’s professional obligation to undertake an appropriate assessment, consider the patient’s medicines history, communicate where clinically necessary with the patient’s usual care team, and provide appropriate follow-up.”
The incoming changes followed advocacy from the family of Victorian woman Erin Collins, who died in from an overdose in 2025 after filling prescriptions from multiple online prescribers, none of whom were aware of the others.
As it stands, the initial focus will be limited to services which operate solely or predominantly through telehealth or digital platforms, and services that combine face-to-face and online care are out-of-scope.
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While the AMA agreed that regular GP telehealth services should not be caught by the new ruleset, it also raised concerns that some online-only telehealth clinics may seek to exploit this loophole by offering limited or nominal face-to-face access.
“The rules need to look at the nature of the model, the pathway through which patients receive prescriptions, and the degree to which prescribing occurs outside an established therapeutic relationship,” the association said.
As for scope, the AMA supported prioritising the capture of high-risk medicines in MHR, despite the sensitive nature of these prescriptions.
“Medicines with dependency, impairment, interaction, or misuse risks are the medicines for which visibility matters most,” the submission read.
“Sensitivity is a reason to design appropriate safeguards and ensure clinically important information is visible to treating practitioners involved in the patient’s care.
“This includes opioids, benzodiazepines, psychostimulants, medicinal cannabis and other medicines where fragmented information can lead to serious harm.”
It extended this warning to the national medicines record component of the reforms.
“Incomplete medical records can create false reassurance,” the submission said.
“A treating doctor may reasonably rely on the available medicines history when assessing adverse effects, prescribing another medicine, preparing a patient for surgery, managing acute deterioration, or coordinating care across settings.
“If high-risk or sensitive medicines are invisible by design, the system may fail precisely when it is most needed. A partial medicines record cannot properly support safe prescribing.”
