803 sign up in PCEHR's first week
Over 800 people registered for a PCEHR in its first week of operation, either by telephone, online or in person at a Medicare shopfront, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Ageing said.
Online registration is now possible through the ehealth.gov.au website, with the system functioning well over the weekend despite some glitches earlier in the week.
Pulse+IT reported last week that the call centre for registration was constantly busy, but that had resolved itself later in the week and calls are being answered promptly now.
DoHA had been circumspect about when online registration would be fully functional, but people who have an australia.gov.au account and who have linked that to the Medicare Online service should be able to have their identities verified quickly through an easy to navigate single sign-on system.
The consumer portal for the PCEHR, powered by Orion Health's Concerto platform, currently only includes information such as name and date of birth, and only allows users to add notes to their personal health diary – which is not seen by health practitioners – and to add emergency contact and next of kin details.
It is understood that the provider portal, also being built by Orion Health, will be available for practitioner use as PCEHR-compatible software is rolled out to GPs, which is expected to begin next month or in September.
Posted in Australian eHealth
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Comments
At that rate it would take over 500 years to register the current Australian population.
But you would need to register over 6000 per week just to keep pace the population increase.
500 years - At 18 mins a piece, 6.2 million hours would have been spent doing it.
Back to the drawing board guys!
If it's all too hard, you're probably better off waiting for a few weeks while the gremlins are being sorted out .... after all once you register, there's nothing meaningful you can do with your record and this is likely to be the case for 2-3 more months I suspect.
Worth noting that registration is a three step process. Step 1 involves creating an australia.gov.a u account. Step 2 involves verifying your identity online. Both of these steps leverage existing Australian Government infrastructure and are common whether you're looking to access your Medicare account or DVA account (or other Government agencies in time). Only Step 3 is new and specific to the PCEHR system. Once you have an Australia.gov.a u account and have verified your identity online, you can create an electronic health record. It took me just over 5 minutes to do this for myself and around 2 minutes for each of my children.
Looks like the above people had difficulties with Steps 1 and 2. Worth remembering that this can done in person at a Medicare shopfront or via phone if people find the Australian Government's gateway too difficult to navigate. That said, a lot of people are clearly managing to do it.
I had a similar experience to you, but only because I had a Medicare Online account setup several years ago...can't imagine the number of Australians with such access in place is very high but happy to be corrected.