Department of Health secretary Martin Bowles has set up a Medicare and aged care payments division to take over from the digital payments services taskforce that became a major talking point during the federal election campaign, AAP is reporting.
The department established the taskforce at the start of the year to look at how to modernise the Medicare payments systems, which process billions in payments for the MBS, PBS and Commonwealth-funded aged care services every year. The idea was initially put forward by former health minister Peter Dutton in 2014, with a small amount of funding allocated in the 2014 budget.