GP software routinely integrates e-scripts, real-time monitoring, pathology, radiology, secure messaging and MHR, but our most complex care settings – hospitals – remain the least digitally integrated.
Australia has made real strides in digital health — with My Health Record, Active Script List, ePrescriptions and user-centred practice software integrations transforming medication management in primary care.
But in many hospitals, there are still many gaps in an end-to-end digital medication management solution.
Despite enterprise EMR rollouts, many hospitals still rely on:
- Printed medication charts for inpatients;
- Manual medication reconciliation between wards, pharmacy and discharge;
- Fragmented integrations between EMRs and tools like eRx and real-time prescription monitoring.
We ask clinicians to trust digital workflows but still hand them paper scripts, disjointed systems, and workarounds.
We ask patients to trust a connected system — but we rely on them to accurately recall their medications on hospital admission and discharge them with paper summaries, crossing our fingers for follow-up.
Here are four typical digital disconnects in our hospital systems:
- Admission: inaccurate medication history: clinicians often rely on patients to recall their meds, with no consolidated, real-time view of their dispensed or prescribed history. The result? Omission, duplication, and reconciliation errors.
- Discharge: communication gaps: pharmacists work tirelessly to compile and reconcile medications from multiple siloes — often to hand over paper summaries to be taken to their GP. This slows care and introduces transition-of-care risk.
- Prescribing: unsafe or unverified S8s: real-time prescription monitoring is mandatory in many states, yet poor integration means clinicians must toggle between systems, creating workflow friction and patient safety risks.
- Workflow risk: hybrid digital-paper systems: clinicians still print scripts or hand-sign charts because some EMRs aren’t integrated for end-to-end for digital prescribing. These hybrid systems are inefficient, frustrating, and error-prone.
What’s striking is that primary care systems often do this better.
GP software routinely integrates ePrescriptions, real-time monitoring, pathology, radiology, secure messaging and My Health Record.
In contrast, our most complex care settings – hospitals – arguably remain the least digitally integrated.
Related
We’ve laid the foundations through the remarkable work from the Australian Digital Health Agency and Sparked AU in setting out an interoperability plan and adoption of standards and technology — FHIR, SNOMED CT, NCTS, National Script Exchange, eRx, ASL — but the full value will only be realised when we close the digital loop.
We can do it if we all put our heads together, because the supporting technology is there!
Dr Christopher Edwards is a chief medical information officer, emergency physician and digital health clinician advocate.
This article was originally published on Dr Edwards’ LinkedIn feed. Read the original article here.