My Health Record isn’t fit for purpose, but change is coming

Its dysfunction has annoyed seniors for years and added to health costs. Here’s what it should do, but don’t hold your breath.

28 September 2023
Health
Read Time: 5 mins

Protect your grandchildren

The Department of Health and Aged Care has sent out a reminder about the importance of childhood immunisation.

It asks seniors and other family members to help ensure children are vaccinated on-time according to the National Immunisation Program schedule.

The department says the vaccines set out in the childhood vaccination schedule provide a simple, safe, and effective way of protecting children against harmful diseases that can cause serious health problems.

Details are available here.

The government’s My Health Record website purports to be a one-stop shop for storing medical data for both health professionals and their patients to share.

The reality is somewhat different.

Accessible via MyGov or an app, it is designed to hold comprehensive information ranging from outcomes of GP and hospital visits to test results, vaccination records and even the patient’s own notes.

As law lecturer Megan Prictor notes, My Health Record has been around for more than 10 years, including a controversial change to an opt-out system in 2018–19, and the federal government has invested heavily in it.

However, its usefulness is limited. Prictor writes, “Medicare data contains virtually no clinically relevant information.” It only provides the date of a clinic visit or a test, a brief description of the reason for the visit, and the provider’s name.

To be fair, My Health Record does include some more useful information about medicines the patient is taking, and organ-donor information (which is available elsewhere).

Now, the federal government says it is upgrading the system at a cost of $429 million over two years so that it works as intended.

For example, when you get a blood test or other diagnostic test, the results should be uploaded to your My Health Record and be viewable by both the patient and the practitioner, quickly and automatically.

Now, it can take seven days – if it’s uploaded at all.

Change is coming, but we’ll be waiting a while. The staged rollout doesn’t begin until 2024.

The Department of Health and Aged Care says diagnostic imaging and pathology providers should be uploading patient results to My Health Record by 30 June 2024, and be legally obliged to do so by December.

The government says the changes aim to give patients and their healthcare providers better access to key health information, when it is needed, to help:

Empower patients to participate in their own healthcare.
Make it easier for healthcare providers to coordinate care and access information.
Support healthcare providers to make better clinical decisions.

If you want to have your say on My Health Record, you can do so here before 31 October 2023.