Potential benefits

Introduction to My Health Record in general practice

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Last revised: 12 Jul 2024

Potential use cases for accessing and/or uploading information to My Health Record in general practice include:

a new patient presents at your general practice and you have no health record for them
you are seeing a patient who is travelling outside of their home area or an itinerant patient without a usual GP/general practice
your patient has recently been seen in an emergency department
your patient cannot recall all the details of their medical history
your patient has chronic or multiple conditions and sees different healthcare providers
you are seeing the patient as an after-hours home-visiting GP, or one of your patients has recently been seen by an after-hours GP.

My Health Record allows healthcare providers to spend more time with patients and less time searching for clinically relevant information. Through My Health Record, healthcare providers can access helpful medical information they do not already have in their local records.

There might be particular benefit in using My Health Record to gather relevant information in the following situations:

in the event of a medical emergency
when the patient is travelling and needs to seek care from a number of healthcare providers who are unknown
where the patient has several healthcare providers; for example, in the case of chronic or multiple conditions.

Utilising My Health Record might:

provide access to patient information you would not otherwise have
help your patients to track and manage their own health
assist in medicine management, reducing the risk of medical misadventure
reduce time spent chasing up a patient’s health information
make your practice eligible for financial incentives (subject to fulfilment of other criteria)
assist other healthcare providers through information uploaded by your general practice.

My Health Record does not replace existing communication between providers. It provides another source of information you may not have previously been able to access.

Amandeep: I think as GPs we've been naturally skeptical about the My Health Record which we tend to err on the side of caution until proven otherwise. As being somebody who's been quite deeply involved in educating people around it, I think it has so many benefits that actually outweigh the disadvantages that we keep focusing on. I think this is the way the rest of the world is going, I think we are being now seen internationally as a leader in this space will be one of the first few countries to have this national record, I think patients are excited about it. With My Health Record, I think it's important to remember it is really about the consumer, it's about the patient. It's for the first time in Australia actually giving the patient their own information.

We really need to understand that anything that empowers our patients is something we should encourage and support. So for patients, they all of a sudden are able to take their own personal medical information with them wherever they go through the health system and across Australia [On-screen text: My Health Record may provide healthcare providers with helpful medical information not already in their local records]. The benefit of this is not just healthcare providers that get to contribute to the content of this record, it’s actually a patient's own information. They can put up their own health summary, they can put in their allergies, they can add in their medication and certainly putting in emergency contact details. Also definitely there's contribution from all parties in that record.

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