"Listening to the debate in parliament last week, I noticed that many of them don't understand the PCEHR," Dr Hambleton said.
"What they were talking about is a shared health record. This is not a shared health record, it's a personally controlled e-health record that contains a point-in-time health summary which is curated by a nominated health provider.
"The senators were talking as though this is a real-time, online, live shared health record and suddenly we'll have everyone's records available to everyone who needs them. That is not what's going to happen. What we're getting delivered and what the senators said in their speeches are not the same thing."
Dr Hambleton said the shared health summary contained in the PCEHR system "will be a summary as at, say the 22nd of July, 2012, which may be out of date by the 25th".
"There's no mechanism for that health summary to be updated on the 25th unless the patient goes back to the health summary provider or nominates a new summary provider on the 25th," Dr Hambleton said.
"The senators need to understand that the shared health summary is not the same as the information held by the GP. It is an extra piece of work providing a subset of the GP's patient record, which is accurate at that particular point in time only.
"It won't contain details of someone's MRI scan, it won't contain pathology results and it won't contain diagnostic imaging -- if it eventually does, it will probably be a summary only, not the data itself. Of course, it would be great if medical practitioners could get access to the patient's latest MRI -- but that's not what's being delivered and I don't know if we'll ever get that."
He said frontline GPs were totally unprepared for the launch, and most would not even know whether their software was compatible. "The fact is, in the practice where I'm working, our software isn't compatible," he said.
"If we're going to participate in the PCEHR, we'll need to change software, and that's a huge undertaking."
Dr Hambleton said it seemed the senators also thought the PCEHR would enable secure, encrypted messaging between doctors -- that it would improve collaborations around patient care.
"Secure messaging is nothing new, and the PCEHR is not a communication tool," he said. "It's not designed to be a mailbox, it is not meant to replace normal communications between GPs and specialists and other health providers, yet there was a perception that this would be a benefit."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 26.06.2012
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