It's a record for rural people.

Abstract

There are a number of reasons why people in rural and remote communities stand to benefit from widespread adoption of a nationally consistent electronic health record. For one thing, a personal summary to share with selected health professionals will help people outside the cities to deal with the tendency for greater turnover in their local health clinicians. Such a record would preclude the need to provide a detailed case history time and time again. It would also help ensure that relevant information was available for the right people when they need to travel to the city or regional centre for health care. The 400 000 ‘Grey Nomads’ who are at any one time on the road – and the clinicians in country locations who meet them for the first time – would also share this benefit. A widely adopted and secure eHealth record would serve to ensure that the correct information is passed between health professionals, which in turn would help minimise errors, limit the possibility for symptoms to be overlooked and assist with the coordination of care that enables people with chronic conditions to receive the full range of services they need. People who are seeing several health professionals for the same health condition, whether they live in the city or the country, will benefit. But people living in outer regional, remote or very remote areas are more likely to report that there were issues caused by a lack of communication between health professionals than those living in major cities (16.5% compared with 11.7%).1 The Alliance has, therefore, been a strong supporter of further development of an eHealth record. It made a submission to the review of the Personally Controlled E-Health Record (PCEHR), and the report from this review (the Royle Review) has recently been released. The review recommended that the PCEHR be renamed ‘My Health Record’ – MyHR – and that it should become an opt-out system from 1 January 2015, while retaining all the current patient controls on its use. To increase the value of MyHR to clinicians, a minimum set of records including demographics, current medications and adverse events, clinical measurements, and hospital discharge summaries should be implemented at the same time. News on the subject seems to be encouraging. The May Budget provided $140.6 million to support the operation of eHealth and the PCEHR system for 12 months, while the government continues planning its response to recommendations of the review. Minister Peter Dutton anticipates a considered, appropriate and efficient response to the review, with a system that will be properly funded into the future. He has indicated that the PCEHR must be more practical for the Australian public, as well as more clinically relevant for doctors, nurses and other frontline health care providers, as recommended by the Royle Review. It seems likely that the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) will be dissolved and replaced by the Australian Commission for Electronic Health (ACeH) reporting directly to the Standing Council on Health (SCoH).