Talk About Being Out of Touch with Reality and Practicality.

The following appeared today.

GP standards to include e-health

by Jared Reed

New accreditation standard will mean that GPs may be required to show they are working towards the government's e-health agenda that kicks off later this year with the launch of unique health identifiers (UHI).

A likely addition to the upcoming fourth edition of the RACGP Standards for General Practices will ask GPs to ensure their practice and patient data is coded and de-identified.

But Dr Lynton Hudson, Chair of the college’s National Expert Committee on Standards for General Practices, tells 6minutes that coding itself will be done by software programs and is likely already happening in most practices.

Practices will also need to ask patients for three forms of identification to be checked against the patient’s file, such as proof of name and date of birth, and possibly the patient’s UHI should forthcoming legislation pass through Parliament, Dr Hudson says.

“The three identifiers are important because it’s been shown that that decreases error,” said Dr Hudson.

Lots more here:

http://www.6minutes.com.au/articles/z1/view.asp?id=511635

And can you see every General Practice in the country consuming secretarial and GP time doing all this for the sake of patient identification for no payment or incentive?

As a tired old blogger all I can say is that these people are totally out of touch with what is practical and affordable in GP. As far as specialists and others I suspect they will break down in tears of laughter!

Who on earth thinks this is a good idea? If this is an accurate report the RACGP has really lost it!

David.