Out of more than 1000 GP respondents, 35% reported they never use My Health Record to access patient information, while a further quarter do so just once or twice a week.
Likewise 38% said they never upload patient information to the platform, and another 31% upload only one to two times a week.
The results come as the RACGP calls for an overhaul of the system after their soon-to-be-released 2024 Health of the Nation survey found 31% of GPs rarely or never use it.
Meanwhile, a Productivity Commission report released in May indicates only about 2% of uploaded documents are accessed by other healthcare professionals.
My Health Record “continues to be plagued by incomplete records and poor usability” and “patient data is still fragmented,” the report points out––and Healthed’s survey indicates these are major issues.
When asked why they were not using My Health Record to access patient information more often, approximately 30% of GPs said system design, usability and technical issues were to blame.
Many described it as ‘clunky’, ‘cumbersome’ and ‘hard to navigate.’
“The system design is frustrating—it takes too many steps to find the information, and often it’s not even there,” said one.
Professor Karen Price, immediate past president of the RACGP, GP and researcher, agrees.
“The concern we’ve had with My Health Record is it’s not easily searchable. Some people refer to it affectionately as ‘My Shoebox’,” she says.
“A number of times I’ve tried to use it and I’ve been blocked or not able to use it and it just doesn’t sit into the workflow.”
“In an incredibly high-paced, very demanding profession you’ve got to have something that’s pretty much at your fingertips.”
Professor Price says it’s clear that the technology is the issue, not the end-users.
“I fear there’s a prevailing attitude that GPs are just too difficult or we’re luddites, but when you see how quickly and readily we took up telehealth, how we vaccinated the nation, how we adapted quickly––we were the earliest adopters of computerisation in medical records out of all of the other disciplines.”
“So it’s not about not being willing or able, it is about whether or not it’s a useful, pragmatic, easily accessible additive that doesn’t slow us down in our work.”
Many GPs said time constraints were the main reason they didn’t access or upload patient information more often.
“It takes too long to find the data I need. Often quicker to ask the patient directly,” one said.
“It’s too slow to navigate, and I can’t afford to waste time in consultations,” another commented.
Thirty percent of respondents said they are too busy to upload patient data during consultations, while some said it was a lower priority than providing patient care.
As one GP wrote, “It’s just extra work—there’s no time to explain, get consent, and upload data.”
Several respondents said the system was redundant.
“I already know most of my patients, and their information is in our local system,” one wrote.
“The nirvana of having a shared record is great, but we’ve got to make sure we’re not going to have volumes and volumes and volumes of information which might not all be useful—that makes it unusable,” Professor Price says.
With the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner receiving more data breach notifications between January and June this year than they have for 3.5 years, and the highest number of these notifications coming from healthcare providers, data security is unsurprisingly a concern about My Health Record.
“I think patients, and people more generally, are waking up to the issue of privacy of data and secondary uses,” Professor Price says, citing the recent revelation that I-MED Radiology network allegedly shared patient data to train AI models without consent.
“We need to be very clear about secondary uses of data because we know how valuable health information is, even de-identified information, how precarious that may be. So there’s a whole lot of questions—and I think we can answer them—but they just need to be thoughtfully, carefully worked through with both the users of the record and the subjects of the record.”
“So with both doctors, clinicians and patients more generally, to make it easy to use but also hard to misuse. And those two opposing forces are quite a challenge.”
Another concern is that carefully curated records could further fragment care if simpler tasks are then delegated to less qualified professionals.
“We don’t want our good record keeping to be used as a way of fragmenting care and taskifying,” Professor Price says.
“That might seem like a simple proposal, but it ignores the therapeutic relationship when we’ve had many times patients come in for a headache, but it ends up being they want to talk about infidelity and have an STD check. That’s not going to happen if you taskify medical practice.”
My Health Record has a long history of problems, Professor Price points out, noting “luminaries of our profession walked out because they weren’t being heard” in its early days.
“When there’s been that kind of challenge in its birth, then you’ve really got to make a big improvement for it to be acceptable,” she says.
What your colleagues are saying:
“Clunky and not user-friendly. I have to click through multiple steps to get to the information.”
“The data I need is already available within our practice’s software, so I rarely use My Health Record.”
” It’s a hassle to navigate, and the interface needs major improvement.”
“I will only upload information if I know that it is up to date which involves time that I don’t always have.”
“It’s too complicated to use, especially when I’m trying to access data quickly.”
“Very cumbersome to access information, not intuitive to navigate.”
“Hard to follow and access relevant information. Lots of clicking of the mouse resulting in information not being available at the end.”
“Too time-consuming to access, especially when the information is not relevant or up to date.”
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