The Department of Health and Aged Care has hit the halfway point in its efforts to digitise its operations.
Health has been identified as a key area likely to benefit from generative AI, but there are immediate benefits to digitisation too.
A universal digital health record was one of the first steps the government took in this direction. The idea is all healthcare providers have a single authoritative source of information that includes a comprehensive history of the patient.
Efforts to achieve this in the form of the MyHealth Record were slowed by concerns about the government’s cybersecurity capabilities. Similar systems are being created for service providers, that allow the direct connection of personal record-keeping software with government databases.
Despite this, enrolment numbers have now reached approximately 90% of the Australian population.
The wholesale digitisation of the service started in 2021 and is expected to continue until at least 2025.
First assistant secretary Fay Flevaras has been tasked with managing this transition at the Department of Health and Aged Care.
Speaking at a Digital Transformation Tech Talk, she said while not all the results were visible yet, there had been significant work done on creating the digital infrastructure to support the transformation.
“Our building foundations are two primary platforms called the Government Provider Management System (GPMS), which is our single provider portal that interacts with us in government, then our business to government (B2G) platform, which is where our software community can interact with us and start connecting their software to us.” she said.
“[this] makes the administrative burden on the sector less by ensuring they don’t have to double enter between our systems and the systems they already have in their own ecosystem.
“We also have a third platform, which is the My Aged Care Portal, today that we continue to introduce new enhancements to and new functionality.”
Addressing feedback from people working in the sector, Flevaras said the department was eager to work with health and aged care service providers on creating a system that worked for them as well as the department and the general population.
She said the feedback they’d received highlighted particular areas of concern – artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, interoperability, cybersecurity.
While AI is something the department is considering along with the whole of government approach to AI, the latter three concerns are more immediate.
Interoperability is at the centre of digitisation efforts, with the intent to create a “seamless experience” across all areas of the healthcare network.
“We’re actively exploring the potential for connecting the provider experience across care systems, especially in overlapping areas like aged care, veterans care and disability care.
“We need to make sure we have agreed standardised data and we’re sharing it across government safely as well.
“Given we know aged care doesn’t exist in isolation on its own, that it depends a lot on the rest of the healthcare ecosystem … I think the interoperability agenda is really front of mind.”
In the emerging technology space, the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing what is possible with the use of personal sensors and wearable health devices.
These are allowing people with serious health problems to have doctors monitor them while they go about their lives, rather than having to make regular visits. Remote foetal monitors are gaining traction as a means to both reduce the workload of healthcare workers and give pregnant people greater peace of mind.
“We’re seeing a lot of items falling into this category that are helping older people live more independently, safely and for longer in their homes,” Flevaras said.
“While our work on digital transformation isn’t about building these devices specifically, we do see how the IT advancements across health and aged care hold a lot of promise to support reform recommendations.”
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