NSW Health announced recently that it has enhanced the functionality
of its HealtheNet
Clinical Portal, enabling patients’ discharge medication information to be
viewed by other healthcare providers via the national My
Health Record.
Live at all local health districts, the HealtheNet Clinical
Portal is a secure database that provides NSW Health clinicians with immediate
access to patient information which resides outside of the hospital's
electronic medical records (eMR). This includes hospital medical imaging
results, pathology results, medication information, discharge summaries,
community health summaries and alerts and allergies.
And, as of 25 November, HealtheNet is now integrated with
iPharmacy and is feeding data showing medication dispensed on discharge from
selected NSW Health facilities into My Health Record.
In addition, HealtheNet now provides all NSW Health
clinicians with access to the National Prescription and Dispense View in My Health
Record, which includes prescription records from GPs and dispense records from
community/retail pharmacy nationwide.
South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, Illawarra
Shoalhaven Local Health District, Sydney Children’s Hospital at Randwick and
The Children’s Hospital at Westmead are the first sites to begin sharing
dispensed medication records from iPharmacy with HealtheNet and My Health
Record.
Other local health districts will follow suit in the wake of
the successful integrations at these sites.
“This is a significant achievement – by sharing this
additional medication information, NSW Health is helping to support all healthcare
providers involved in a patient’s care,” said Julie Cashin, Program Director,
HealtheNet and Integrated Care, eHealth NSW.
“HealtheNet saves time for clinicians as they don’t need to
chase up important information and in an emergency it can make all the
difference.”
The Australian government allocated AU$374.2 million in
its 2017-18 Budget to be invested over two years, for the nationwide rollout of an opt-out model of My Health Record and to ensure every
Australian is a part of it, unless they choose not to be. Currently,
over 5 million Australians have a My Health Record.
During the past few months, significant progress has been
made in getting different stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem, such as pharmacies,
pathology labs and software
vendors to join My Health Record. In June, the Australian Digital Health
Agency (The Agency) released a Request for Tender (RFT) to develop a Strategic Interoperability Framework for
Australia, with the objective of contributing to the deployment of a
seamless digital health eco-system. The Agency is
working with clinical information systems (CIS) vendors to
develop nationally-scalable, secure electronic messaging between
healthcare providers.
