Pharmacies with FRED Dispense ready for eHealth

Huge news for those Pharmacies who use Fred Dispense!

The Fred IT group has released a new PCEHR enabled version of their software. . This will hopefully encourage other pharmacies to sign up as the useful software will now be available for their use.

McDonald (2013) explains that this update provides Fred equipped Pharmacies with the ability to send information through the eRx and the National Prescription and Dispense Repository (NPDR), which is due to do live this week. Further, the NPDR and the PCEHR are estimated to be able to talk to each other before the end of the month which is great news for those Pharmacies who are currently registered for the PCEHR. What a huge step toward paperless prescriptions and something that most people do not think about, a huge step forward for the environmentally-friendliness of this Profession! 

We can hope that this will encourage Pharamcists to begin promoting ehealth to their customers and patients and advising them to sign themselves, or even receive help from the Pharmacist to be signed up for their own PCEHR. Pharmacists will be integral to the uptake and application of this program as they can identify and counsel those who would most benefit from having an ehealth record, such as parents of small children, the elderly and those with chronic illnesses about the benefits, also provide a helping hand in signing up for the program. It would be great to see a greater uptake of PCEHR when the NPDR and PCEHR are both live and able to communicate with one another. 

These are exciting times for ehealth in Australia and one can only hope that these new software updates provide a platform in which Pharmacists can lead the way in promoting eHealth in Australia to ensure a more cohesive 21st Century healthcare system.

 

REFERNCE

McDonald, K., (2013) Pharmacies ready for NPDR as PCEHR v3 nears. PusleITMagazine. accessed from http://www.pulseitmagazine.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1420:pharmacies-ready-for-npdr-as-pcehr-v3-nears&catid=16:australian-ehealth&Itemid=327 on 09/05/13

Tips for Maintaining Privacy with Ehealth

New developments and programs bring the need for new privacy laws and regulations. This is the case with eHealth in Australia.

From the 12th March 2014 the privacy laws and guidelines in Australia will be receiving a sort of make over and upgrade. Bigger changes than have previously been made to the Privacy Act (1988) will be implemented. The changes include the creation of 13 Australian Privacy Principles which will replace the current National Privacy Principles (for the private sector) and Information Privacy Principles (for the public sector).

These new principals include new regulations to encompass eHealth, such as the PCEHR Act 2012.

Information that is important for the public about their privacy and eHealth records can be sourced from the new Office of the Australian information Commissioner (OAIC) Website under Pubications and Resources. Factsheets number 13,14 and 15 are explicitly related to ehealth privacy, two sheets for healthcare professionals and the public. http://www.oaic.gov.au/ is a good place to start!

Tips for maintaining privacy with your Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records include:

• You are in charge of how much influence you have over the information that can be accessed by specific healthcare providers.
• Decide upon what access settings you would like as soon as you sign up, and regularly check and update these. Keep up to date with who is on your ‘access list’.
• You can organise an access code to further restrict access to your record by certain healthcare providers, or even restrict access to particular  documents if  you do not want them to be accessed. This access code would ensure that only healthcare professionals that you approve of can access your eHealth record.
• It is recommended that those who sign up or are thinking of signing up read the eHealth record System Operators privacy notices and policies to further their understanding about how their information will be handled.
• If you do not want certain information or a certain document uploaded to your eHealth record by a particular healthcare professional, you should let them know. If it has already been uploaded and they refuse to take it down you can organise for the documents removal through medicare.
• Always be sure to think it through and decide upon the importance of a document before removing or requesting its removal, as once it is removed from you eHealth record, it will not be available during an emergency.
• Remain vigilant about checking to make sure no unauthorised access to your eHealth record has occurred.
• Check your record frequently to be sure that information held on the record is up to date, correct and complete.
• One of the most important aspects of keeping your health information secure and private is by making sure you protect your record with a strong password.
• The new system is protected by the PCEHR Act (2012) which limits how information may be collected, used and disclosed. If information is not collected within these regulations then this is an interference with privacy.
• You may opt-out at any time.

Important privacy information tips for Healthcare providers include:

• Heathcare providers need to know what is expected of them under the PCEHR Act as there are serious penalties for non-compliance, (information can be collected, used and disclosed to provide healthcare to the patient)
• Develop robust practices for using the PCEHR system and be sure all staff are adequately trained
• Inform patients of any information that you will be adding, do not add information that you have not previously discussed with them.
• Do not collect more information from someone’s Ehealth record than is necessary
• Be professional and practice responsibly when collecting, using and disclosing information from a patients eHealth record.
• Understand how an eHealth record can be used in the case of an emergency

It is important that all parties involved know what their role is in maintaining privacy when it comes to eHealth records. It really is a situation where patients are just as crucial to the maintenance of their private health information as healthcare providers. One of the interesting aspects of the system where the patient seems to have the majority share of power.

Pharmacists need to be sure that they are completely up to date with current privacy laws surrounding eHealth, and understand the new changes coming in to force next year. Maintaining the integrity of our patients privacy is always paramount, and thus this new age of IT and Health collaboration means that Pharmacists need to ensure a complete understanding of their role when it comes to privacy and patient health. Pharmacists remain the middle man between doctors and patients (especially when it comes to medications), therefore they will have to learn to balance their information share between collection for healthcare reasons and collecting/ accessing more than is required.

These are interesting  times in which we do live!

New Software leading the way for Ehealth to really get going.

A report in the last week states that ‘Best Practice Software’- A GP desktop software vendor has released their latest piece of software that allows GP’s to finally upload documents onto the PCEHR’s of their patients (McDonald, 2013). This is a huge step forward for the eHealth initiative, and a much needed boost for things to really get rolling. All of the other software vendors involved in the National e-Health Transition Authority’s (NEHTA) have also released their versions of this software which spells a win for the possibility of a viable e-Health system.

Further McDonald (2013) states that the government will now finally begin its advertising campaign around PCEHRs and the eHealth initiative in Australia, including television commercials. Some (including this blogger) might say this is a long overdue step in the right direction given that the level of those signed up for a PCEHR is still disparagingly low, at about 160,000 (Wong, 2013). Given that we are now a country of 23 Million, this is not comforting. The beginning of an effective advertising campaign and the implementation of this software in doctor’s officies, hospitals, allied healthcare offices and of course pharmacies can only be a good combination for furthering this cause. The sooner we get to see the real landscape of eHealth in Australia and all of its possibilities, the more effective it can become as a truly integrating and game changing practice. Something that we as training health professionals will be able to look forward to being a part of in the future.

References

McDonald, K. (2013) PCEHR- enabled Best Practive now available. Pulse+It Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.pulseitmagazine.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1400:pcehr-enabled-best-practice-now-available&catid=16:australian-ehealth&Itemid=327 on 27/04/13

Wong, M. (2013) Potential for big data through PCEHR. Pulse+It Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.pulseitmagazine.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1393:potential-for-big-data-through-the-pcehr&catid=16:australian-ehealth&Itemid=327 on 27/04/13

PCEHR-An untapped database of patient medication history?

After choosing to blog on this particular topic of issues around eHealth for Pharmacists, I decided to do a little investigating. I wanted to know what this PERSONALLY controlled electronic health record system was all about. Signing up for the eHealth record was quite easy, all you really need is your medicare card and to have some knowledge of your own personal details…seems reasonable. Once I had registered and looked at my own yet to be populated eHealth record, I was struck by how this system could make the entire healthcare process so much more integrated and efficient, as long as it is widely adopted. The second thing that struck me was a little sidebar of information running down the left side of the record. As the eHealth record seems to be largely administered by Medicare, all of my doctors visits and PBS prescriptions that had been dispensed over the past 3 or so years were there. I believe this to be an untapped resource.

One problem that we still have in our society is a dependence and in some cases an addiction to certain medications. The people who are addicted to these medications sometimes do drastic things to ‘beat’ the system to get them. This includes seeing multiple doctors to get prescriptions for the same items, and having these dispensed at different pharmacies so as not to be detected. Further, at a Pharmacy we only have the medication history of a patient to the extent of the medication that they have had dispensed at our pharmacy. This can prove problematic at times when we do not receive the whole medicinal history of our patients. How does this tie in to electronic health records you may ask?

The information that is collected by Medicare regarding dispensed prescriptions is already providing us with an avenue to cut down the level of medication misuse and abuse, and to gain a more complete medical history of our patients to cater more efficiently to their needs. Currently this information it is not used in this manner by Medicare. All PBS prescriptions which have been dispensed show up on that particular individuals eHealth record. A record that, if widely or universally adopted in Australia would lead to a greater benefit to society as a whole, which would provide pharmacists and other health professionals with an extra tool in their ability to treat patients effectively and provide other forms of therapy if needed.

But now we come back to the main issue for pharmacists and the Ehealth initiative. If the system is purely based on personal choice to opt-in, how will better health outcomes for patients to be reached? Can a system where compliance is not mandatory in an area as pivotal to our society as healthcare truly achieve better outcomes without a complete framework and information database to work with?

Alternatively, is an integrated Electronic Prescription Database (independent of the eHealth initiative at this time), with mandatory membership of all pharmacies a more reasonable answer at this time? The ETP is somewhat attempting to create this with efficient flow of paper-less prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies planned for the future, but is this really integrating our dispensing systems enough? An all encompassing national database would contain the information already collected through medicare and all of the patient records within individual pharmacies which would work together to help strengthen the foundations of conscientious dispensing within this country. We have the technology so why not the initiative? An inter-connected database and transfer of prescription information between all pharmacies nationally is really not all that far-fetched as an idea.