Telehealth tussle still a toss up but is all hell about to break loose in NSW?

The ongoing saga that is federally funded telehealth policy dominated the start of the week in Australian health IT, but at the end of it, we were hearing some pretty startling news about the direction that eHealth NSW is thinking of taking with its single digital patient record (SDPR) project.

The doctors’ lobby groups managed to get the Department of Health and Aged Care to change its mind on dropping the level C telephone consult item for COVID-19 antivirals, but that is as far as the department seems will to budge at this stage. The combined wrath of the college of GPs, the AMA and even the Royal Australian College of Physicians has been let loose on the department through submissions to the Australian National Audit Office’s (ANAO) recently announced audit of the expansion of telehealth services.

We here at Pulse+IT have whinged time and time and time again – and also time again – about the constantly fluctuating fortunes for telehealth policy and funding over the last two years but to little avail. It was a comment on our story on Monday about the drama – which also included some very wise words from Coviu founder Silvia Pfeiffer – that brought a lot of it home. It is the lack of access to GPs in regional and rural areas as well as the “prior requirement” that is causing the greatest hardship, not access to IT or money or how long a GP needs to prescribe antivirals.

The whole policy disaster is in no uncertain terms a shit show. It needs to be sorted. Surely one of the five ministerial appointments in the new government, whether it be Mark Butler, Anika Wells, Emma McBride, Ged Kearney or Malandirri McCarthy, could take the bull by the proverbial and once and for all sort it out?

We are well aware that there telephone consults over 20 minutes are rare enough and that DoHAC is on high alert for rorting, along with the doctors’ groups concerns over pop-up telehealth, but changes to policy and items over the last two years has been bewildering, illogical and bloody annoying. In the new government’s honeymoon period, there is time to sort it out once and for all, even if the doctors get upset.

Meanwhile, the acute care sector gets on with it. Money has been provided to Northern Health to extend its VVED initiative into aged care and for antiviral prescribing for people who don’t have a regular GP. South Australia is doing interesting things in paediatric telehealth (although SA Health media has blocked Pulse+IT from covering it) and Monash Health is piloting a virtual pharmacy service for hospital patients on blood pressure meds.

And while telehealth policy and funding were the big topics at the start of the week, we began to hear some quite remarkable rumours at the end. Could it be possible that NSW Health is planning to use its Single Digital Patient Record (SDPR) project, which is touted as providing a unified record that combines data from all matter of different clinical systems, as a means to reassess its whole hospital EMR strategy? Is Hunter New England, the outlier in NSW in using a different system from the other local health districts, being leaned on to try out an upstart that is increasingly gaining popularity and million-dollar contracts in Australia? And is the success or failure of that trial going to be used as a use case to ditch a billion dollars’ worth of investment in health IT systems since about 2009?

Could be. No one was available for comment today. If you know anything, give us a buzz here.

On Monday, Pulse+IT is launching our new aged, community and digital care newsletter, which we are fondly calling ACDC. It will be sent to everyone on our 19,000+ mailing list on Monday morning, but if it’s not your thing, you can adjust your preferences at the bottom of the email. We have also had a redesign of our vendor directory – take a look vendor directory – and are in the final throes of setting up a new website. More about that soon.

In the meantime and back to telehealth, here’s our poll question for this week.

Does MBS-funded telehealth policy need a complete reset under the new government?

Vote here or leave your comments below.

Last week, we asked: Does NSW’s patient app sound suspiciously like a good idea? Absolutely, according to 95 per cent of respondents to our poll. We also asked why you chose yes or no. Here’s what you said.