The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) has set up a new national medicines safety program to look at how digital technologies can help improve the safety and quality of medicines usage, with a steering group to conduct an 'environmental scan' of the market to identify opportunities to improve coordination, collaboration and investment.
Co-sponsored by former AMA president Steve Hambleton and former rugby league player Steve Renouf, the program will in the short term look at enhancing medicines management use and capability in the My Health Record system.
Dr Hambleton said the program will draw on work already done by the likes of NPS MedicineWise and the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC) but the role of the steering committee and ADHA itself will be as a coordinating body, and the environmental scan of digital activities will take in developments by private software companies as well as public health bodies.