Health Record a ‘digital dinosaur’
THE $2 billion My Health Record uses technology so out of date that crucial patient information on test results and diseases can’t be shared or read by computers.
Harvard medical school e-health guru Dr John Halamka, who is in Australia to speak at the Wild Health Summit, said the My Health Record was nothing more than “digitised paper”.
“The My Health Record is a noble idea but the standard they chose is from 1995, it uses PDFs, it’s not computable, it is just digitised paper,” he said.
Doctors have already complained they have difficulty using the record because it is not searchable and it can take hours to find the test results or records they need because they have to open each PDF file to see what it contains.
When they do find the information they can’t reformat it to personalise a health plan for the patient.
The chair of the Australian Medical Association’s medico legal committee Dr Chris Moy said it was a symptom of a much bigger problem — the failure of health systems, hospitals and doctors’ clinics around Australia to agree on computer codification and software interoperability.
Patient safety was at risk, he said.
“In one state there are 150 software systems that don’t talk to each other: the cardiology ward’s system will not talk to the main hospital system, how unsafe is that?” Dr Moy said.
The problem has been caused by a failure at all levels of government and health to develop and implement standard naming of medical conditions, procedures, medications, allergies, he said, as well to enforce purchasing policies so all systems communicate with each other.
Dr Moy said the AMA supported the My Health Record but state and federal politicians needed to show leadership on the issue so health systems were forced to agree on codes and frameworks.
In the US and China all health information will have to be computer coded from next year so crucial information like peanut allergies or blood pressure diagnoses can be read by computers, plus searched and shared between hospitals, doctors and health apps.
Harvard’s Dr Halamka is involved in computer coding the most often used data in health care and from next year it will become a legal requirement of every health provider to use this national system.
This means he will be able to use his smartphone to download every health record held about his healthcare by any US healthcare provider.
The Australian Digital Health Agency, which runs the My Health Record, says “Australia is globally competitive in solving the challenge of interoperability that every nation is grappling with”.