Digital Health Literacy
MY HEALTH WAY
My Health Record (MHR) – the way to aid yourself for your own health management MHR is a secure online summary of an individual’s health information, and is available to all Australians. Healthcare providers authorised by their healthcare organisation can access My Health Record to view and add to their patient’s health information.
From a health care professional stand point, Important patient information will be available to you quickly and exactly when needed. But this requires the patient to embrace ‘My Health Record” platform, work very closely with Health Care professional – be it your GP, Pharmacist, Allied health provider etc.
My health Record is an Australian Government Initiative that essentially provides a technology based platform that enables you – as Australian Citizen or Australian Resident – to safely store your health related details. This will lead to better information sharing between different sources, for example between you, the GPs and hospitals.
Indian Support Center (ISC) is very seriously involved in embracing MHR. ISC has taken this very novel step to percolate the benefits of MHR to wider Australian community by becoming a network partner with Good Things Foundation, who in turn work very closely with Australian Digital Health Agency.
MHR is a robust IT platform that provides a secure infrastructure for Australians ( Citizens and Permament residents) to store, retrieve, manage their health data. This enables us to be able to access our health data even when we are outside of Australia as long as internet access is available.
MHR enables you to store outcomes from your GP visit, store your medical imaging products, pharmacy prescription data, allied health data, pathology results, oral health information etc. There is absolutely nothing that you would need to do to create your MHR record. BUT it is your responsibility to populate and maintain your health record.
Though process that underlies MHR is no different from your bank account, credit/debit card account, home loan account etc. Once these things are set-up for you, it is for you to make sure that contents therein are correct.
Think about platforms such as train reservation, airline reservation, bus reservation etc.
Infrastructure to make your trip a safe one and happy one are ‘given’ to you by various agencies. It is for you to make use of them – and MHR is pretty similar to the above landscape.
As more people and healthcare organisations use the My Health Record system, Australia’s national health system will become better connected. You can make positive contribution in this journey by being a part and parcel of MHR, in terms of making sure that your health records are available in MHR platform – clean and current.
For many decades, healthcare providers have relied heavily on the use of technology like the fax machine and letters delivered by post, to share important patient information such as test results and referrals. However the need of the hour is timely availability of patient data to health care providers – When clinicians have timely access to as much relevant patient information as possible – that is your health data – they can make better treatment decisions.
In subsequent issues, you will get to know more and more about MHR – also called ‘My health way’ (MHW) , how Indian Support Center is making steady contributions in this space, what technology platforms are already embraced in the health sector – that are super hot.
So, please stay tuned.
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Submitted by Dr Giridhar Tirumalai; ISC DHLP Tutor/Mentor.