Potential benefits of My Health Record

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

1. A new patient presents at your general practice and you have no health record for them
2. You are seeing a patient who is travelling outside of their home area or an itinerant patient without a usual GP/general practice
3. Your patient has recently been seen in an emergency department
4. Your patient is a poor historian
5. Your patient has chronic or multiple conditions and sees many different healthcare providers
6. 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 consumer is travelling and needs to seek care from a number of healthcare providers who are unknown in advance
• where the consumer has many healthcare providers because they have chronic or multiple conditions.

Accessing a patient’s My Health Record might…

• provide access to information you would not otherwise have
• help your patients to track and manage their own health
• assist in medicine management
• mean you spend less time chasing up a patient’s information
• make your practice eligible for financial incentives (subject to fulfilment of other criteria)
• assist other healthcare providers through your uploading of information

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