Sonic adds radiology to MyHR, but where’s Primary?

If the MyHR can tempt other major private providers to upload information and break out of its trial regions it might be useful to GPs

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Hot on the heels of last week’s landmark announcement that the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) had convinced Sonic pathology labs to join the My Health Record program, Sonic has announced its subsidiary, Queensland X-ray, (QXR) will be the first private radiology provider to upload reports to the system.

Specialist radiologist and Sonic Imaging’s CEO, Dr Philip Dubois, said: “Providing access to each patient’s radiology reports to multiple treating clinicians in both public and private hospitals, as well as in community practices, will eliminate unnecessary duplicate studies and give clinicians relevant diagnostic information in a timely and reliable manner.”

Dr David Mitchell, representing the Australian Orthopaedic Association, said: “Surgeons welcome this announcement. It will enable us to track down where imaging has recently been performed so that we can contact the diagnostic imaging provider and ask for the images to be sent to us.

” The next step will be to use this foundation for surgeons to be able to access recent imaging on-line and we look forward to working towards this goal.”

 As with pathology uploads, the radiology uploads are starting only in the “opt-out” test regions. Widespread availability of the service across the country looks like it will have to wait for the opt-out trials to be formally approved, something that may happen sooner now that the trial regions are starting to load more useful data to the MyHR. 

The ADHA  is rolling out both its pathology offer and its radiology offer to all private providers, but so far, Sonic is the only major group that is working on connecting its services to the MyHR.  

The ADHA says it is confident of other providers coming onto the program soon, but thus far there are no signs of Primary Health Care or ACL joining in.

If or when they do, and if or when the program ventures beyond the opt-out trial regions, GPs will be likely to see a MyHR that is vastly more useful than it is currently.

 The ADHA has indicated it hopes to be in this position within the next six to nine months.