I have spent a little time this week coming up to speed on just what the new Medical Locals Alliance is up to in the e-Health space.
eHealth for Medicare Locals
The Department of Health and Ageing is supporting a program to raise the awareness and readiness of MLs to support the eHealth record system, aiming to:
- Raise Medicare Local awareness and understanding of the eHealth record system
- Clarify what MLs can do to support adoption of the eHealth record system (and to assess their readiness to do so)
- Provide MLs with the information they need to communicate the benefits and implications of the eHealth record system to those in primary healthcare settings
- Guide MLs on how they may support primary care providers ‘get ready’ for the eHealth record system (e.g. NASH, health identifiers, software, workflow implications)
This page will be a central point for all materials developed under this program of work.
This is the key link:
These links - on the side of the main page - take you to a lot of content:
Related Content
- Tier 1: eHealth Record Awareness
- Tier 2: eHealth Record Readiness
- Tier 3: eHealth Record adoption
- Tier 4: eHealth Record meaningful use
The most useful presentation I have found is the one found here:
I strongly suggest you browse carefully through the content provided here.
The success factors are seen to be:
Success Factors:
- Ongoing direct engagement with MLs as the key stakeholders
- Lifting capability and capacity of all MLs and leveraging experience in the network
- Clear and agreed outcomes and activities that can be measured and reported against
- Mobilise as quick as possible to allow maximum support time within the funding period
- Alignment with other initiatives and streams across national eHealth and ML programs
What is happening in the next few weeks is a road show and selection of recipients of grants (of between $450,000 and $600,000) to get all this happening across the 61 Medicare Locals. (Apparently $50M has been allocated overall according to a Ministerial Release earlier in the year)
I particularly point people to Page 15 which provides a timetable for what is planned.
Having all the needed software for Providers to access the PCEHR is planned for Mid November (yes this year) and it only gets worse from there.
My view is that this page reflects a deep lack of understanding of how long things take in the real world and totally misunderstands the feeling of GPs regarding top down initiatives of this sort which suddenly arrive out of a “clear blue sky” as all this has in the last few weeks.
To me this is all hopelessly rushed, under resourced and misunderstands that GPs are busy people who don’t have the mental bandwidth and time to absorb all sorts of complicated documents and instructions in just a few weeks or even months.
I predict a total fiasco will be seen within months as all the consultant “foilware” is shown up for the impractical nonsense I believe it is. This will all take years not months if ever to happen and the plans as they presently exist are pure fantasy.
David.