The venerable RACGP issued quite a peculiar press release this week calling on the government to overhaul the My Health Record and for more funding to improve its useability, saying it won’t be able to fulfil its potential to be the “one-stop store for Australians’ health records” without significant investment.

We say peculiar because the college is well aware that the modernisation program for the My Health Record has been underway for about five years and that vast sums have been allocated to this process, including $429 million in the May 2023 budget.

We’re also confused at the definition that it is a “one-stop store” for health records. It never has been this and never will be, but let the college be the college, we suppose. It also said 31 per cent of GPs rarely or never use the My Health Record. We doubt this will ever change, regardless of overhaul.

At the same time, it issued issued a press release to its in-house news service concerning the administrative workload that now sits on the shoulders of doctors, which it says is growing even further as a concern for GPs, up from 60 last year to 70 per cent this year.

The administrative workload had become so out of control, it is now the top reason many are planning to stop practicing in the next five years, the college says, but that 66 per cent of GPs said a reduction in compliance would encourage them to keep working for longer.

This barrage of press releases has certainly served a purpose for the RACGP, and that is to provide publicity for its upcoming Health of the Nation report, which is due out next month. There are no figures on how many GPs were surveyed for the report and we don’t know the methodology, but the publicity certainly achieved its aims in that everyone will be looking out for it in October.

That said, there’s plenty to what the college is saying about administrative burdens on GPs. They call for the removal of the PBS authority system, which they’ve been asking for for years, and also for a reduction in the length and duplication of forms for Centrelink, the NDIS and DVA, to make them compatible general practice clinical systems. They also take aim at what they call overly complex hospital referrals that force GPs to use a specific template for each hospital unit.

But just like the plans to modernise the My Health Record, the college well knows that the government is nudging the system, slowly but surely, into using digital forms for medical certificates, and it well knows that each state and territory is moving towards a regional or statewide electronic referral programs.

We’ll see what the State of the Nation report reveals next for month, but in the meantime, if the college is looking for some electronic tools that could help reduce the burden on GPs, have we got news for them!

Just this week, AI and automation tools were back in the headlines with cloud-based EHR and PMS vendor MediRecords announcing that it had integrated Heidi Health’s AI medical scribe into its system. Heidi Health has been around for a while and had big plans for practice automation and telehealth at one stage, but has since reduced its scope somewhat to just its Heidi AI medical scribe, which it is successfully exporting around the world.

Also this week in AI, Magentus has got together with Propel Health AI, supported by Amgen Australia, to provide a free tool for dermatology practices within the Genie practice management system that will be able to search through the PMS and make a list of patients relative to the new consensus on treatment goals for moderate to severe psoriasis.

Magentus hints that this new dashboard is just the first in a suite of secure AI and data-enabled tools for specialists that it plans to release.

There was also a really interesting story from the Hunter, New England and Central Coast PHN, which has launched its own AI-enabled general practice initiative, which will be open to 10 practices in the region to test and try out AI and automation tools, and to communicate with other practices to share their experiences and demonstrate the value of AI.

Selected practices will receive full funding for all AI tools integrated into the practice, along with training and support. This is quite a very clever little program and we congratulate the PHN on launching it.

And in another area, Telstra Health has worked with HealthLink to integrate the latter’s Smart Forms eReferrals platform into Telstra Health’s cloud-based PMS Helix, using Telstra Health’s new Smart API+ solution, which will give third-party technology partners a unified FHIR-based gateway to connect with Telstra Health’s primary care software. This is going to be the way it goes in future, as practice management systems all move to the cloud, and is another smart program, to quote a phrase.

Back to the RACGP and its concerns about administrative workload, and it’s interesting to compare the rhetoric on health systems around the world. A study released this week by The Commonwealth Fund ranked Australia’s health system as the best in the world, followed by the Netherlands and the UK. This had Australian Health Minister Mark Butler cheering from the rafters and taking credit as it mentioned the tripling of the bulk billing incentive as a noticeable improvement to affordability in the Australian healthcare system.

The Commonwealth Fund study compared the health systems of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US over five key domains of health system performance. And while Australia came out on top overall and second in terms of administrative efficiency – that will be news to the RACGP – it ranked quite poorly at ninth in terms of access to care.

The study defined access to care as the affordability and availability of health services at the population level, with the Netherlands, the UK and Germany performing the best and the US the worse, just after Australia.

The lack of affordability in the US is what the Commonwealth Fund calls a pervasive problem, particularly as health insurance is linked to employment, but in terms of care availability, the study puts a lot of the blame directly on the fact that primary care is undervalued in the US, with American patients more likely than their peers in most other countries to report that they don’t have a regular doctor. Shortages of primary care services add to these availability problems, the study says.

So what can be done about it? Well, according to the World Health Organisation, which popped up this week at the UN General Assembly in New York, investing just 22 euro cents or 35 Australian cents per patient per year in digital health interventions could avert approximately seven million acute events and hospitalisations and save more than two million lives from non-communicable diseases over the next decade.

In terms of economic benefits, the accrued health gains of implementing digital systems such as mobile messaging, health chatbots and telemedicine were conservatively estimated to surpass $199 billion US, which is nothing to sneer at.

However, the Going digital for non-communicable diseases: the case for action report also acknowledges that evidence on the effectiveness of digital health solutions is still evolving, and that while more than 60 per cent of countries have now developed a digital health strategy, a lack of integration of new technologies into existing health infrastructure continues to be a challenge. Tell us about it.

That brings us to our poll question for the week.

Do you think reducing admin workload will encourage GPs to stay in practice?

Vote here and leave your thoughts below.

Last week, we asked: Are you planning to use AI in your practice? Yes! Everyone – or 85 per cent – are still keen. Here’s what you said.