Consultation on digital health strategy closes as opt-out results set for release

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) will officially begin formulating the national digital health strategy after the three-month-long consultation phase closes tomorrow, with a series of proposals to be taken to COAG later in the year and a four-year work plan developed to implement the strategy.

ADHA CEO Tim Kelsey told a public webinar today that the agency will analyse the feedback it has received and meet with the jurisdictions and the Commonwealth, with a series of proposals put to COAG for its approval.

Mr Kelsey also said the evaluations of the opt-out trials of the My Health Record would be released shortly. Calling it a fantastic piece of national infrastructure, Mr Kelsey accepted that the former PCEHR had been criticised historically because it “hasn’t delivered the vision that they were promised and it still doesn’t”.

“Our job is to make sure that it does as quickly as we can,” he said. “[W]hat we are finding is that people really want this service to work well. One of the reasons for that is that it does enable much more personalised access to information about yourself, that you can control.”

PCEHR reviewer and former AMA president Steve Hambleton, who was also chairman of the government’s Primary Health Care Advisory Group (PHCAG), said the My Health Record and digital technologies in general would underpin another major health policy initiative in Health Care Homes.

Dr Hambleton said the invitation for general practices to take part in the first trials of the initiative through 10 PHNs had been oversubscribed, with more than double the expected number volunteering.

Releasing some of the outcomes of the consultation, ADHA chief medical adviser Meredith Makeham said there was optimism in the community that digital technology will help improve health outcomes, but this optimism was tempered by pragmatism and the knowledge that past digital health initiatives had not always met expectations.

Professor Makeham said there was a perception that current digital solutions were not sufficiently inclusive and were often complicated, poorly designed and not easy to use, which was inhibiting them from being adopted by the general public or clinicians.

She said there was a lot of disappointment and disillusion, particularly from clinicians, about past eHealth initiatives.

“I think it had to do a lot with the sometimes top-down imposition of services and technologies that weren’t necessarily designed with a sensible user design experience,” she said.

“[S]ometimes digital services seem to get in the way of what we’re trying to do rather than support us in delivering care.”

Mr Kelsey said the ADHA would not take a prescriptive approach to rolling out digital health, although there will be standards that need to be agreed in order to balance the need for public confidence with the need for innovation in the digital services.

“My personal view is that I think this is the beginning of a revolution, a knowledge revolution, of a kind that we can’t fully imagine yet,” he said. “I think there will be a proliferation of services that will sit on top of My Health Record and other parts of the emerging digital infrastructure in Australia that will genuinely transform the way people think about their health and well-being and support their doctors to help them make key decisions.

“We really are in the foothills of it now. I think we will see a lift-off because the community will suddenly see the opportunity, and indeed already is beginning to do so.”