In September, the federal government announced a new $2 billion COVID-19 health measures package that extended the temporary MBS item numbers for telehealth for a further six months. It also included an extension to the subsidised home delivery of medicines measure, as well as continued free access to the Healthdirect video conferencing system for GPs and SMS messages for electronic prescriptions.
The special arrangement for image-based prescriptions was also extended, as was the end-date for software with fast-tracked (FT) eScript capability. Towards the end of the year, vendors such as MMEx began rolling out ffully conformant versions, and by December, Health Minister Greg Hunt was announcing that item numbers for telehealth would be kept permanently.
