There has been no shortage of media coverage of the unsustainable state of primary care in Australia lately, with major workforce challenges, skyrocketing demand, a lack of growth in Medicare rebates, and changes to the interpretation of payroll tax law all contributing to a measurable shift away from bulk billing to mixed or private billing.
Many people’s hopes had been pinned on the recently published Strengthening Medicare Taskforce Report to identify a set of actionable recommendations to reinvigorate the primary care sector in the immediate term and set forth a roadmap to transform and modernise the way patient care is delivered.
Whilst criticism of the report has focused on the lack of an immediate solution to the rising gap between inflation and rebates, it’s promising that digital transformation has been identified as one of four key areas for reform. Sharing information, empowering people to own their health data, and driving value-based care through the use of data and digital technologies are all highlighted as keys to modernising primary care.
As the Report rightly points out,
“Critical patient health information remains locked in siloed clinical information systems and cannot be shared easily across the health system and care settings…We need to continue to invest in infrastructure that improves interoperability between systems, simplifies and streamlines data sharing and access, helps improve the security and resilience of the whole health system, and accelerates progress towards a consumer driven health system.”
The recommendations put forward to bring that vision to life are a mixed bag. We believe there is a better solution to the accessibility of longitudinal healthcare data than My Health Record, by creating an interoperable system that enables instant accessibility of specific patient data at the point of care - the right data, in the right place, at the right time. We would welcome any legislative frameworks or regulations that support improved standardisation of data sharing and we’re confident that our technology will ultimately make it easier for Australians to access, manage and understand their own health information.
Halo Connect is solving these problems our own way, with our healthcare API platform massively lowering the barrier to interoperate with on-prem Practice Management Systems (PMSs), providing a bridge across PMS Vendors' on-prem and cloud products, and improving the security of integrations and data transfer.
To learn more about how we’re helping modernise primary care, please reach out to us at hello@haloconnect.io