Australian Digital Health Strategy Question

Jan 8, 2018

On the subject of replatforming the MyHR, the Australian Digital Health Strategy has this to say: Every healthcare provider will have the ability to communicate with other professionals and their patients via secure digital channels by 2022. Patients will also be able to communicate with their healthcare providers using these digital channels. This will end dependence on paper-based correspondence and the fax machine or post.

I’m doing some consulting to the Agency around Secure messaging, and I’m thinking about this. I haven’t heard any discussion about this anywhere - what would it look like?

  • Would patients have to communicate through a MyHR portal? Or could they choose to use their normal Email? Or should there stringent security requirements?
  • Would doctors ask patient’s for the email id? or would the register it via their MyHR?
  • Would patients get a Doctor’s email from their website? Or would they look it up in the national healthcare directory?
  • What kinds of workflows would you build on top of that? Care plans? Scheduling?

Obviously this is all just idle speculation. Surely there’ll be formal consultation and design and so forth later. But maybe we can toss around some ideas now…