Aged care industry welcomes new IHI law
The ACIITC says IHIs are important prerequisites for an electronic health system.
The aged care industry has welcomed the passing of the legislation to enable individual healthcare identifiers.
The IHIs are seen as a fundamental building block in the development of an e-health system.
The Unique healthcare identifiers will be allocated by the Healthcare Identifiers Service which is operated by Medicare Australia.
Although IHIs are separate from electronic health records, the Aged Care Industry IT Council (ACIITC) said the introduction of the identifiers was an important step in enabling individual health records to support e-prescribing.
The council hopes to deploy IT systems throughout residential and community aged care.
“GPs pharmacists and aged care facilities all now relate electronically to medicare but at the moment, the relationship is substantially a claiming one,” said ACIITC spokesperson and Aged Care Association Australia (ACAA) CEO, Rod Young.
“People are anxious not to mix up claiming with managing health records.
“Now we can use the IHIs to clearly define who our client is, to define who the health practitioner is and who the pharmacy practitioner is – as well as their organisations.”
The federal Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon said the IHIs would assist healthcare providers to improve their efficiency.
“Healthcare identifiers will improve the management and communication of health information for healthcare delivery,” she said.
“They will help provider organisations better identify and manage patient information.”
