We were also delighted to see the former chair of the RACGP's eHealth expert committee, Nathan Pinskier, pick up HISA's prestigious Jon Hilton award. Dr Pinskier, who does a huge amount of voluntary work in the background lobbying for standards and quality in health IT, joins luminaries such as Grahame Grieve, Adam McLeod, Mike Georgeff and Terry Hannan in winning the award.
In addition to the wider use of standards-based secure messaging, Dr Pinskier has always been keen on the idea of a secure system for transferring medical records when a patient moves to a new practice. The UK and New Zealand have for years had systems, both called GP2GP, that allow a patient's data to be electronically transferred to the new practice even if the practice management system is a different brand. In Australia, those records that are transferred are generally sent by fax or post and scanned in at the other end.
The good news is that the CSIRO's Australian eHealth Research Centre (AeHRC) in Brisbane has been commissioned by the Department of Health to work on a set of primary care projects to improve data quality by using FHIR and SNOMED CT, and one area being worked on at the moment is the practice-to-practice transfer use case. There are plans for this work to be expanded to the residential aged care software industry as well to support the transfer of records in aged care.
This was a pleasant surprise to hear, as we had just attended a workshop on how technology can help aged care and it was disconcerting to say the least to find that the same questions are still being asked about technology in aged care now as they were a decade ago. Former iCareHealth managing director Chris Gray made a mention of this in his presentation, when he reminded attendees that back in 2005, the then government provided funding of $1000 per RACF bed that saw a big uptake in digital adoption. Government incentives work, Mr Gray said.
But while about 90 per cent of aged care facilities now use a resident management system, there is still the problem of transfer of data between care settings, particularly primary care and hospitals. As Macquarie University's Johanna Westbrook told the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety last month, the aged care sector is helping to keep the fax business going. (Professor Westbrook's evidence to the commission is worth a read: it begins on page 38 of this transcript.)
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