I would rephrase that as ‘Take any poll with a grain of salt.’
Some will delve into polls veracity and some will take them at face value. In general many salient points have been made in this topic regarding MyHealth Record and I am not aware of any of the participants being medical practitioners.
Hi @m.hedley, welcome to the community and for adding to the discussion on this topic.
The “medical profession”,
Many practices now appear to use nationally available business management service providers. “HealthEngine” is one such product.
An alternate proposition is that it is these large management service providers that have the greater vested interests in your medical records. The GP and practice are at best a minor partner?
‘HealthEngine’ offers patients mobile Apps, personal logins, a medical services finder service, and so much more based on your personal needs!
Do we all need to ask who is really in control of our personal medical information? I’ve refused to become part of our GP’s practice ‘HealthEngine’ booking service. You need to create a personal identity and sign up to the App provided. This comes with a typical user agreement re data privacy policy and data sharing agreement! My choice not to use the App does cause some pain across the front counter.
Welcome to the future where it is not only the government that has an interest in our personal medical histories.
I had my annual appointment with a specialist yesterday and I had not been requested to have any blood tests for it.
His secretary simply asked me which pathology business had undertaken the tests ordered by my GP and rang them, gave my name and DOB, and they immediately forwarded the results to her.
She did the same for my last bone density test results which were undertaken by another business.
Not even necessary to contact my GP which I had expected they would do.
No need for MyHealthRecord in this case.
Your GP was already registered with that pathology service (they also would have a provider record for Medicare and billing purposes).
Their records indicated your result was requested/ordered by said GP (that they’re allowed access to said result) and then it probably gets sent (the secretary couldn’t have asked for it to be sent to any old locale).
Depending on how the request is made for the result its also quite possible for such matters to go all the way up to the board of said organisation to approve.
Now if you rang up and asked for that result it would have been far more complicated and not nearly as fast (which is partly where MHR comes in).
When you need to transfer all your medical records to another GP is another scenario where MHR is meant to help (even today its probably one practice may fax records to another etc).
Optimistic based on personal medical experience. We managed to transport our personal medical records in one form or another for more than 30 years across five different practices. The last of these went digital and a centimetres thick pile of records handed on between practices was reduced to digital pixie dust. When I next moved the 30 years was reduced to less than two pages printed. 90% of the history and 99.99% of the records were gone. The only good news was 30 years of xrays and the more significant pathology reports were still in our possession. Of course modern practices have no means of collecting and saving these. They are now digital only!
Today many reports go direct to your GP and the detailed reports are not in your possession at any stage. You need to ask for copies.
The best advice. Never move locale. Stay with the one GP for life.
Pun optional. 
or ‘take anything with a grain of salt’ 
My GP practice uses Hotdoc for bookings. However, I discovered that I dont get bulk billed if I use it, so I only used it once for a relatively urgent appointment after Christmas, because the office was unattended (obviously) and I needed first available after boxing day. I ring now, and hang the consequences.
For records, they use Medical Director.
My Health Record apparently continues government’s long and ignoble history of making white elephants.
That may be a consequence of making it opt-out. Most people don’t even know they have one because they never gave consent and were never even informed. So they are never going to ask a health provider to upload something, and it isn’t really in the health provider’s interest to offer the possibility given that it is just extra work for the health provider.
Even the half that are not empty are probably mostly ignored by the patient, who had no involvement in the decision.
You don’t ask a provider to upload, they choose to integrate with MHR and unless you have opted out the information goes up. Not sure how far back that might reach (if at all) so its plausible that unless you end up with a current record you don’t get added to the system.
If they’re empty its because organisations are not attempting to integrate (10% of population did opt out too). Have heard of private companies dragging their heels as they want GP’s/Medical staff to have to access via their system not MHR.
Might not like the idea of ‘opt-out’ but conversely could be like organ donation which is ‘opt-in’ and very few people ever tick that box.
On a related item with Medicare.
I noted recently on linking to Medicare to MyGov for online access, there is an immunisation record screen. Great! Medicare has been around for yonks and I’ve had lots of jabs for work and travel.
Surprise! 
Only three records of the most recent annual flu shots.
Perhaps it may be of some use for those born very recently? I’m still hanging on to all those tatty bits of paper, although there have been tetanus boosters and hepatitis shots for which there is no apparent trail. The local GP’s records would still be the best source, for those who have never changed GP since birth.
On MyHealth Record Initiative.
Should the Government abandon MyHealth and mandate a compulsory level of record provision and security by the medical profession. Privatisation! The legislated requirements to include patient ownership and transportability for life, privacy assured? We appear to have a legislative template in the financial services area to ease customers moving between providers of other services.
Be careful what you wish for. The government already has their preferred model, the ATO. They could persevere until they make My Health Record a perfect clone that knows all and sees all, opting out not being one of the options after a sufficient amount of Scotty’s Marketing.
I don’t know which is the better option, if at all.
On one side there are the vested interests of the medical profession and commercialised providers of medical practice software. The latter are all competing to be the dominant provider. Personal Data is valuable as we mostly know. The challenge is whether legislation could unclog this system such that transportability of an individuals medical history and records was assured when you change providers? This would not change existing privacy protections, or the need for better protection of how the existing data is collected and reused by others.
The arguments for the alternative MyHealth include that the existing system of personal health management in the private sector is not accessible to the individual/patient. Further that records are “lost” over time and with relocation. The interest in the private sector making MyHealth work may be minimal.
MyHealth appears to duplicate or mirror a portion of the private enterprise solutions. Possibly in more depth than than the ATO might be able to do with records of financial transactions. There may be reason to be suspicious of government, although with a greater superset of data with private enterprise, who should we trust most.
Perhaps MyHealth should be a personal App where each individual is the only holder of the data and record. All confidential and protected in the cloud. We all know we could rely on Google for such a service. Or perhaps the free ‘FaceDoctor’ login? 
This is a very contentious area. Who owns the data? The patient? The doctor? The government?
Traditionally doctors would claim that they create the data and that they own the data. A likely consequence from too much change in that equation is that certain information will simply be suppressed from the patient record and/or parallel shadow records will be kept. A clinical area where this might be particularly relevant is psychiatry. What would you write if you knew that a) the patient b) all future psychiatrists c) the government d) law enforcement e) sundry other medical practitioners f) sundry court action participants were all intentionally going to have access? never mind about foreign state actors and random hackers.
You may think that that list from a) to f) is more than who actually has access (maybe it is, maybe it isn’t) but once the data is collected you have no control over the fervent demands and lobbying that will lead to future expansion of the allowed purposes and access.
That would imply some kind of mandatory, open standard?
(The government would have to do better than they are doing with the ATO financial data interchange.)
In theory that seems like a good idea but in reality the government does not act with any moral authority because they are the worst offenders in creating privacy problems.
You crack me up.
I am unconvinced that the government has any interest in considering or pursuing any alternative.
It has been pointed out to me by someone who works in the industry that there is an opposite possibility, namely that the only content in there is content generated by the patient. That would apply to those patients who are actually supportive of the idea of My Health Record, but their treating health professionals are not so keen on unpaid labour.
So if someone in the media is writing that half the records are empty, a supplementary question to ask is: what would that percentage rise to if we counted records that are not empty, but where all the content is generated by the patient, as being empty?
I have done this or similar to get my own results. The testing agency does not check who you are.
The company that provides the IT interface. Unfortunately, as doctors in the US have found, having a central ‘managed solution’ provider is fine until that provider gets hacked or ransomed - affecting every one of the surgeries that rely upon their services.
Better to update that then: Who owns the data? The patient? The doctor? The government? A third-party service provider? A hacker? 
Equally an item that could belong with discussions of data breeches or privacy concerns? It is for regulation purposes specific to legislation that enables the Government MyHealth Record.
‘Inconsequential’ is referring to data breeches that are deemed to have caused no harm although the system has been breeched. Alternately any potential breech as there has been no harm.
The spin on ‘eroding trust’ is to justify not reporting either type of breech so that trust is not eroded.
If you think I’m a little crazy, the ITNews article is likewise reporting the opposition of the OAIC (Office of Australian Information Commissioner) to lessening the protections provided for under the original legislation.
If Government has it’s way it will be changing the T&C all current uses accepted when they first joined or chose not to opt out. It’s a bold assumption that not reporting transparently and publicly sloppy management and near misses improves trust.
Sounds like we are soon going to have one single repository of who has had vaccination against the SARS-2 virus which causes COVID disease. Which vaccine on which two dates. Possibly also record of batch number and cold chain history for the vaccine (as well as identification of the person receiving the vaccine).
(by the way I think this is a good thing).
Currently people going overseas from Australia to places where Yellow Fever is a risk have to be immunised to protect from Yellow Fever before they go - in order to be allowed back in to Australia.
Previously people who went overseas from Australia to places where smallpox was a risk had to be immunised to protect from smallpox before they went - in order to be allowed back in to Australia. (this is why I have a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm).
==> whether it is the MyHealth Record or a new better record-keeping system we definitley need this for vaccinations (mandatory and optional, infant & child & adult) as well as for all the other health things (scans, pathology tests, operations, reportable illnesses, etc)
