Sue Dunlevy, National Health Reporter, News Corp Australia Network

First published in The Daily Telegraph, November 22, 2018

Exclusive: The $2 billion My Health Record uses technology so out of date that crucial patient information on test results and diseases can’t be shared or read by computers.

Harvard medical school e-health guru Dr John Halamka said the My Health Record was nothing more than “digitised paper”.

“The My Health record is a noble idea but the standard they chose is from 1995, it uses PDFs, it’s not computable, it is just digitised paper,” he told News Corp Australia.

Doctors have already complained they have difficulty using the record because it is not searchable and it can take hours to find the test results or records they need because they have to open each PDF file to see what it contains.

When they do find the information they can’t reformat it to personalise a health plan for the patient.

The chair of the Australian Medical Association’s medico legal committee Dr Chris Moy said it was a symptom of a much bigger problem — the failure of health systems, hospitals and doctors’ clinics around Australia to agree on computer codification and software interoperability.

Patient safety was at risk, he said.

“In one state there are 150 software systems that don’t talk to each other: the cardiology ward’s system will not talk to the main hospital system, how unsafe is that?” Dr Moy said.

The problem has been caused by a failure at all levels of Government and health to develop and implement standard naming of medical conditions, procedures, medications, allergies, he said, as well to enforce purchasing policies so all systems communicate with each other.

Dr Moy said the AMA supported the My Health Record but state and federal politicians needed to show leadership on the issue so health systems were forced to agree on codes and frameworks.

Leadership is needed to codify health data says the Australian Medical Association. Picture iStock

In the US and China all health information will have to be computer coded from next year so crucial information like peanut allergies or blood pressure diagnoses can be read by computers, plus searched and shared between hospitals, doctors and health apps.

Harvard’s Dr Halamka is involved in computer coding the most often used data in health care and from next year it will become a legal requirement of every health provider to use this national system.

This means he will be able to use his smartphone to download every health record held about his healthcare by any US healthcare provider including the sequencing of his genome. He was the second person on earth to have his genome sequenced.

After a recent diagnosis of high blood pressure, Dr Halamka used a blood pressure cuff linked to his smart phone to monitor his body’s response to the beta blocker medication he was prescribed to control the condition.

The standard 50 mg dose made him cranky and tired but he found he could lower his blood pressure to acceptable levels and eliminate the side effects of the drug by using just a 12.5 mg dose.

Before the My Health Record will be useful it must adopt new technology developed by an Australian that is taking the rest of the world by storm, Dr Halamka says.

Australian tech expert Graeme Grieve has developed the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources FHIR system which allows sharing of health data between clinics and hospitals and healthcare workers on a variety of platforms including mobile phones, computers, apps, the icloud.

It relies of having a computer code for each disease, medication and test result.

“The FIHR standard is taking the world by storm, it’s being adopted in every country except the country it was developed in,” Dr Halamka said.

Already the software is used by GP clinics in Australia but it hasn’t been built into the My Health Record.

The Australian Digital Health Agency, which runs the My Health Record, said: “Australia is globally competitive in solving the challenge of interoperability that every nation is grappling with.”

“Highly recognised international digital health sector leader Grahame Grieve (Founder and Product Director for FHIR) presented just this week to the Agency, and is advising us on how the Agency can use the learnings from Project Argonaut to give us a head start, backed up by a local Argonaut project will bring the technical community together in ways we’ve never seen before,” the agency said.