HealthOne to increase access for patients and providers

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

HealthOne is working to expand access to the shared care record system by providing an API for accredited patient portal providers and making it web-based.

HealthOne brings together and electronically stores health information about a person -including such information as GP records, prescribed and dispensed medications and test results - and covers everybody living in the South Island.

The records are accessed more than 300,000 times every month by people involved in a patient’s clinical care, up from around 130,000 in July 2018.

There are more than 27,000 active account holders for the system and it is accessed via the Connected Health Network, a Ministry of Health encrypted network for the health sector.

HealthOne programme manager Nigel Kingshott says this means users have to be able to access that network, which comes at a cost, to be able to view the shared records.

“This limits who can get access as they have to be on that connection, so we are looking at enabling HealthOne on the web securely, without the connected health connection requirement,” he says.

This is probably around six-months away, but will be “ground-breaking” in providing access to a larger group of organisations involved in health care, he adds.

The HealthOne team is also building an API (Application Programming Interface) to allow patient portal providers to access information stored in the shared record. 

Key to this is identity management, to ensure the person requesting access to the record is the right person, and the team is working with the Ministry of Health’s digital identity team on a proof of concept around this.

The aim is to enrich patient portals, making them “much more useful and available to people,” explains Kingshott. 

“We can continually improve information for clinicians to take care of people, but there’s an increased push for patients to take care of themselves and to do that they have to be empowered with this information,” he says.

Troy Gilmore, HealthOne product manager at Pegasus Health, says this means that patients will no longer be locked into using the patient portal that their GP has selected, as they could choose another trusted portal that is integrated with HealthOne.

HealthOne also contains Encounter Notes from some facilities, which are the free-text GP clinical summaries. Pegasus Health 24-hour Surgery went live in July 2019, followed by three Southern district practices and last April, Marlborough Urgent Care also started contributing.

Gilmore says these records often provide valuable additional information during transfer of care and can be marked confidential if the patient requests it, giving the patient control over what information they share with other healthcare providers.

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