Digital Health Literacy

Stay informed and proactive in healthcare with ISC’s Digital Health Literacy workshops. Gain confidence in navigating online resources and telemedicine platforms.

My Health Record (MHR) – the way to aid yourself in your 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 healthcare professional standpoint, Important patient information will be available to you quickly and exactly when needed. But this requires the patient to embrace the “My Health Record” platform and work closely with Health Care professionals – 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 an Australian Citizen or Australian Resident – to store your health-related details safely. 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 the broader Australian community by becoming a network partner with Good Things Foundation, which work very closely with Australian Digital Health Agency.

MHR is a robust IT platform that provides a secure infrastructure for Australians ( Citizens and permanent residents) to store, retrieve, and 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 similar to your bank account, credit/debit card account, home loan account etc. You must ensure the contents are correct once these things are set up for you.

Think about platforms such as train reservations, airline reservations, bus reservations etc.

Infrastructure to make your trip a safe and happy one is ‘given’ to you by various agencies. You can use 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 contribute positively to this journey by being part and parcel of MHR to ensure that your health records are available in the MHR platform – clean and current.

For decades, healthcare providers have relied heavily on technology like fax machines and postal letters to share critical patient information such as test results and referrals. However, the need of the hour is the timely availability of patient data to health care providers – When clinicians have convenient access to as much relevant patient information as possible – 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 the Indian Support Center is making steady contributions in this space, and what technology platforms are already embraced in the health sector – that is super hot.
So, please stay tuned.

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Submitted by Dr Giridhar Tirumalai; ISC DHLP Tutor/Mentor.