Healthcare professionals will have better access to information about their patients and the results of their referrals to the My Aged Care system under changes set to come in on July 3, while the aged care service provider and assessor portals will have a complete revamp to their user interface when release 8 of the system goes live on July 24.

There is still no resolution in sight to the problem repeatedly raised by GP groups that referrals to the system require them to send a fax or a webform, but Department of Health representatives say the changes will allow clinicians to act on behalf of their patients with consent, track the progress of referrals and deal directly with assessors, which will support continuity of care.

DoH officials told an industry webinar today that along with a host of changes to the user interface, the MyAssessor app is also being improved to allow most of the assessment to be done offline while face to face with the client, and aged care organisations struggling to cope with managing numerous AUSkey accounts can instead use the VANguard Federated Authentication Service (FAS), which functions much like single sign-on.