IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Patients in rural, regional and outer metropolitan areas are expected to be the biggest beneficiaries of the increase in Medicare funding for telehealth services because they will no longer have to travel to big cities to see specialists.

Incentive payments of $6000 are available for health practitioners who take up telehealth services, along with a $20 bonus each time a practitioner bulk bills a service in the first year. New Medicare items will allow benefits to be paid for existing consultation services conducted using video conferences.

The project was initially funded in the 2010 Federal Budget to the tune of $466.7 million after years of the health industry and technology experts calling for development and national leadership in e-health and health identifier technology to better tie together patients’ records and achieve clinical outcomes. The project is overseen by the Department of Health and Ageing in coalition with the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA).

The government has won the agreement of big doctors' groups, including the Australian Medical Association, to new arrangements that will allow doctors to claim as much as $100 from Medicare for collating health records with their patients. But as part of the agreement the government has also agreed to postpone the deadline for doctors to meet e-health capability requirements until next May, after originally proposing February.

Held on Tuesday, the meeting followed calls by AMA president Dr Steve Hambleton for Professor Halton to intervene and take a “personal focus” on why highly respected eHealth clinical advocate Dr Mukesh Haikerwal and several other medical advisors suddenly parted company with National eHealth Transition Authority (NeHTA) after a decade of attempting to make eHealth an everyday reality.

Some doctors fear they may be held liable if the patient-controlled records aren’t kept up-to-date. And consumers remain concerned about the privacy of their medical information. So, what are the realities of these risks?

The idea is that the user goes to a GP or other health centre (for example, nursing homes) to have a conference with a specialist who is farther away than the patient would like to travel.

As part of a $620 million initiative, the doctors who decide to do telehealth consultations in 2011/12 get a $6000 one-off payment to fund set-up costs. However, this amount drops to $4800 in 2012/13, $3900 in the next year and $3300 the year after that.

Consumers who customise their personally controlled electronic health record could miss out on its intended benefits, a Parliamentary committee into cybersafety was told.

Consumers Health Forum chief executive Carol Bennett told a committee hearing that doctors could refuse to use a patient's e-health record if that patient declined access to certain medical documents associated with the record.

Online consultations have the ability to help overcome doctor shortages in rural areas and combat rising costs in the Australian healthcare system, according to Professor Moyez Jiwa, Chair of Health Innovation in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Curtin University.

The use of online video technology is a long way from being “routine practice”, which is now prompting further research.

Telehealth is a technological application between medical professionals and patients that allows easier communications between all parties, which has been an important development to address the problems in remote areas of Australia where patients are not necessarily in the vicinity of a medical specialist.

The standards setting process has been thrown into chaos this year, after the Health department cut funding for work being done by Standards Australia’s IT-014 committees in June.

The e-health experts were involved in a large work program on technical specifications needed for the Gillard government’s $500m personally controlled e-health record (PCEHR) system.

Among the first to go was NEHTA's head of clinical leadership Dr Mukesh Haikerwal, the former AMA president, who has been the medical face of the personally controlled e-health records (PCEHRs) for the last six years.

The Australian Medical Association has expressed serious concerns over clinician input into the project following the shock resignation of highly respected clinical representative Dr Mukesh Haikerwal from the National eHealth Transition Authority (NeHTA) this week.

Health Minister Tanya Plibersek announced on Wednesday that GPs will be able to receive Medicare payments for preparing shared health summaries and event summaries as part of a consultation.

"In deciding which item to bill, GPs will only have to consider the reasonable time it would take - not the complexity of the consultation," Ms Plibersek said in a statement.

Doctors are warning it is vital to ensure personal records do not become compromised, as the range of electronic devices available for access grows.

From July, it is planned that health records held a range of settings, from GP clinics to hospitals, will be collated and available online.

The Australian can reveal that the personally controlled e-health records (PCEHR) system, which was taken offline for more than 24 hours for maintenance at the weekend, was affected by 68 critical and high-severity bugs.

Augmenting a state's complex health system with technology requires large projects to allow systems to work with each other — and although these are important, they are not what the state now needs to focus on, according to NSW Health CIO Greg Wells.

The 74-page draft legislation (PDF) was published today, and specifies how Australians can sign up for, control and restrict their own e-health record. The draft also detailed the role of a national operator — who will run customer and provider access portals, core services and the National Repositories Service in a dual-datacentre environment — and revealed the harsh penalties for those found breaching patient confidentiality on the system.

Health and Ageing Minister Nicola Roxon has released the draft eHealth records legislation, known as the personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) system, for public comment.

The draft legislation features harsh fines for a record being inappropriately accessed and if more than one record is accessed without authorisation, the penalty multiplies by the number of records.

The Federal Government has released a draft concept of operations document regarding the use of personally controlled electronic health records (PCEHR) in Australia, which are being touted as a cornerstone of national e-health programs that could revolutionise the way aged care is provided.

The Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, has said that the PCEHR initiative means "patients will no longer have to remember every immunisation, every medical test, every prescription as they move from doctor to doctor".

An eHealth record is a secure online summary of your key health information. Your record can include details about current diagnoses, allergies, prescriptions, test results and hospital discharge summaries.