The following article appeared in the Winter 2011 edition of the Aged Care Australia magazine:
In the 2010/11 Federal Budget, the Australian Government announced that they would spend $467 million over two years to develop and launch a personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) for every Australian who wants one. The aim of the PCEHR is that by July 2012 every Australian will be able to access his or her healthcare records electronically. Each individual will personally control who has access to the information contained within their record.
The Benefits to Aged Care
There is a constant flow of information about eHealth in Australia, but what does it mean and what is being done to ensure the aged care industry is part of Australia’s eHealth journey?
Together with the Federal Government’s telehealth initiatives and the roll out of the National Broadband Network (NBN), the PCEHR aims to provide better health services and healthcare outcomes for all Australians by enabling better access to crucial health information. This will include persons in residential aged care facilities.
In aged care, some of the potential benefits of the PCEHR include:
- the opportunity to access up-to-date health care information on an individual when they are first admitted to an aged care facility;
- continuity of care for aged care residents when transferring to, or discharging from, a hospital; and
- complex medication management.
PECHR Initiatives
The aged care sector is well positioned to play an integral role in PCEHR as many aged care providers already use IT systems to move clinical and medication information within their aged care facilities.
The PCEHR system will be implemented based upon a combination of ‘top down’ national initiatives and ‘bottom up’ lead eHealth sites. National initiatives will focus on delivering the core infrastructure components of PCEHR System, such as Healthcare Identifier (HI) service, National Authentication Service for Health (NASH), call centre for PCEHR, consumer portal and health record index services.
The bottom-up implementation program will concentrate on the provision of two waves of funding for twelve lead eHealth sites spanning different geographic and functional parts of the Australian health sector. The objectives of these sites are to deploy elements of eHealth infrastructure and standards in real world healthcare settings and to demonstrate tangible results and benefits by using eHeatlh.
The Aged Care IT Vendor Association is working closely with the Department of Health and Ageing and NEHTA to ensure that all aged care consumers and aged care providers realise the full benefits of Australia’s eHealth system, no matter which vendor software they have implemented.
To date, the Federal Government’s eHealth initiatives have been broken down into Wave 1 and Wave 2 sites. Wave 1 was announced in the second half of 2010 and involves three sites based around GP’s. The primary objective – provide a community of services for individuals using a range of community and health service providers.
The Wave 2 sites expand on this approach and aim to allow key health information exchanges between healthcare providers and specific health groups.
Nine eHealth sites were announced in Wave 2 on 29th March 2011, with one of those projects – MedView, led by FRED IT Group – involving iCare and the aged care industry. The MedView project will allow consumers and health professionals to access consented patient’s medication history via a PCEHR conformant repository.
The Aged Care Model
iCare will be responsible for the aged care segment of MedView. By providing integration to the MedView medicine repository, iCare will enable nursing staff to access prescribed and dispensed medications of an aged care resident with consent. All prescriptions and dispensing records of the resident will be securely transmitted and stored in the MedView system.
Clinicians will be able to see a combined list of prescribed and dispensed medications regardless of how many different doctors and pharmacies the patient has visited in the past. When a resident is discharged from hospital or returned from a visit to a specialist, the nursing staff in the aged care facility and pharmacist will be able to view medication prescribed by the doctor or specialist via MedView instantly.
The Participants
The aim of the project is to deploy MedView to all pharmacies and GPs in the Geelong region and to a further 10% of this target market nationally. The project will bring together a grouping of private sector eHealth organisations and vendors including GP division of Geelong, Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, Best Practice, Zedmed, FRED Health, Simple Retail, iCare, eRx Script Exchange, Microsoft, Simpl Group, Monash University Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Barwon Health.
iCare is a strong supporter of eHealth in Australia and the use of standards to move electronic health information securely within the health system, particularly as it relates to aged care. We are committed to sharing the knowledge gained from our role in representing aged care in the Wave 2 projects to ensure the aged care industry can take a leading role in the implementation of eHealth in Australia.
