So what is My Health Record (MHR)?
My Health Record brings together all your health information from healthcare providers and Medicare. It is an online platform that can include details of your medical conditions, treatments, and medicine, allergies, test and scan results. Healthcare professional (e.g. doctors, specialists, and hospital staff) may also be to see your MHR when they need to, including in an accident or emergency.
This year every Australian with a Medicare or Department of Veteran’s Affairs number will have MHR created for them, unless you choose to opt out. The owner of the MHR (you) can choose who can access the information on your MHR though all documents are set to general access for healthcare professionals by default.
An online based system there has been a lot of discussion about privacy and security of details that will be available on MHR. To help you make a decision as to whether you would like to keep your MHR or to ‘opt out’ the Consumers Health Forum of Australia have/will host a series of six webinars.
The webinars will cover the following topics,
- Privacy and Security (webinar date August 8)
- Overview of Digital Health (webinar August 23)
- Benefits of My Health Record (webinar August 30)
- Risks of My Heath Record (webinar September 6)
- Digital Inclusion, Health Literacy and My Health Record (webinar September 13)
- Consumer Estimates (webinar October 4)
The webinars began on August 8 and will conclude on October 4. Each webinar is approximately 1 hour long and the CRC will show these in the large meeting room (at the CRC) on the Friday morning following the date the webinar was recorded (see above) for a gold coin donation. The CRC will also catch-up on the previous webinars (webinar one and two) if there is enough interest this Friday August 31.
Alternatively you can watch the webinars online by visiting https://chf.org.au/introduction-my-health-record-webinar-series. For more information about MHR please visit the website https://www.myhealthrecord.gov.au/.