PHN support in uptake of digital health tools

Darling Downs and West Moreton PHN is continuing to provide support to local health professionals to help them leverage the benefits of digital health to ultimately improve patient’s health outcomes.

This has involved PHN staff working closely with practices like Laidley Family Doctors to implement digital health initiatives such as Provider Connect Australia™ (also known as PCA™) to streamline processes in their practice.

Provider Connect Australia is an initiative of the Australian Digital Health Agency to help healthcare provider organisations update their business information in a single source. This improves the accuracy of healthcare service and practitioner information, while reducing duplication and streamlining notifications.

Assistant Practice Manager at Laidley Family Doctors, Ellisha Freeman, spoke on the process of implementing PCA at their practice.

What have been the benefits to your practice?

“Registrars joining the practice each year and adding changes, and the ability to not have to duplicate tasks and let our allied health know and different services we use. It certainly has the potential to be a great time saver in general practice.”

Which business partners do you update through PCA?

“Generally all our providers that our patients use for primary health care. We have visiting allied health to the clinic, so there's four or five different services, whether it be podiatry, audiology, or specialists.”

“There are quite a number of services that we use day to day, even in a small country practice, that we have to notify of address details and change of providers.”

Would you recommend PCA to other practices?

It only takes a couple of minutes to get your details set up. Once your practice is fully set up, it's a little bit of a set and forget, and just adding changes.”

“For the short, brief amount of time that it does take to get that done, I certainly see it as being time saving in the long run.”

How would you describe the digital health support from our PHN?

“Jake and Lee have been our main ones on the ground, face to face with us. They've both been extremely supportive. No problem is too big to find an answer to, so they have been instrumental in getting us on board with doing this and being able to make the transition quite smooth.”

There are four main steps to register for Provider Connect Australia. Follow the below steps.

1. Familarise yourself with the pre-registration checklist
2. Register your organisation
3. Set up you organisation
4. Maintain organisation details.

Click here to find out more.