3 ways to Jumpstart Your Medical Practice’s Participation with the New MyMedicare Program

What is MyMedicare?

The Australian Government is set to officially roll out MyMedicare from 01 October 2023. While the date is rapidly approaching, there are still many uncertainties and questions about the program for general practice.  

MyMedicare is said to be a new voluntary patient registration model designed to reinforce patient care team relationships, with a focus on preventative health. It seeks to encourage Australians to take proactive steps to manage their health, prevent the onset of chronic diseases, and have strong support to lead healthier lifestyles.  

What are the current limitations of medical practices in Australia?

Despite the government’s ambition to provide better preventative care to residents across Australia, medical practices are limited by their digital capabilities to identify the patients who meet the criteria. 

As pointed out by The Medical Republic, “Within a practice, you might ask your friendly POLAR, Primary Sense, PenCat or even Cubiko to develop some new algorithm in their software to dive into your practice data set and try and find patients who match this criteria. It’s possible, but not easy according to one of these providers and several practice managers we talked to.”  

What Medical Republic didn’t know is that Clinimetrix already has all the data available right now. 

Here’s three ways to jumpstart your medical practice’s participation with the new MyMedicare Program:  

1. Find the right data health tool to empower your practicePractice intelligence program, Clinimetrix (CMx) provides patient insight without being limited to item codes and works for your practice by easily identifying which patients qualify under the new MyMedicare program. With CMxClinical, you will be able to find all patients with hospital discharge summaries, as well as how many discharges in any time period, inlcluding: 
   • Find all patients who have been billed a Chronic Disease Management (CDM) item in the last 12 months 
   • Find all patients who have had a CDM item billed but NOT in the past 12 months  
   • Find all patients, by diagnosis, who have a chronic disease but who have NEVER been billed a CDM item 
   What is CMxClinical? It is the designated clinical component of Clinimetrix analytics platform. Developed by general practitioners and nursing staff,  it simplifies and streamlines your clinical workflows and provides the clinical insights you need to improve patient outcomes. You can get an instant overview of your medical practice performance through six charts of the clinical dashboard i.e. pathology results, observations by practitioner, script count by drug class, patient history – including reason for visit and diagnosis, patient overview and active live PIP reporting.  You can now enhance your practice’s digital health capability by leveraging the General Practice (GP) Grants Program. 
2. Understand your patient dataThere is huge potential to make better use of data to inform clinical care. Data is critical to improving patient health, care, and services at any medical practice. With access to up-to-date information, your medical team can make informed decisions and translate treatment options for patients, in order to provide the best care. Data from Clinimetrix allows a medical practice to track progress, improve retention through preventative health services, and focus on high-risk patients. In addition, it allows for the development of patient retention strategies with visibility of attendance frequency and helps to enhance the patient-doctor relationship through understanding and visibility.  Evidence-based clinical data can improve the trust patients have in their GP due to the evident clinical results the doctor is able to present. Clinimetrix also allows for the review, reporting, and analysis of vaccine programs at a medical practice, thereby improving their efficiency and accuracy. With a clear understanding of your patient profiles, CMx allows you to identify common medical diagnosis of the patients who visit your clinic, and thereby design a more effective strategy that better serves your unique patient base.  
3. Track whether the program is working for your medical practice While in-depth understanding of your patient base is important, tracking the financial impact of a new program is imperative to navigating your practice through change and growth.  CMxFinancial is the financial component of CMx. It delivers a financial snapshot of your practice revenue at any point in time, thereby, allowing practice owners/managers to have a quick analysis of the business and practitioner performance for the calendar year, month, or week to date. You can also understand GP billing behaviour, the value of MBS and non-MBS items, trends over time Year-on-Year comparisons etc. CMxFinancial also delivers data on the number of returns per patient and number of returns per GP according to the APB, allows the practice to conduct a gap analysis, identify some of the underlying causes of the gap and implement strategies to improve business performance.  MyMedicare is a major initiative which involves every part of the health care ecosystem, including regulators, payers, providers and patients; the uncertainty of its implementation means you need the right data tools from day one so you can be successful with this model. As the media has pointed out no other software package can deliver the tools needed. Clinimetrix delivers visibility within a medical practice, essential during times of change. Through clinical and financial insights, your medical and management teams can continue to make confident and informed decisions at the forefront of the industry. 

References:

https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/mymedicare

https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/seven-reasons-mymedicare-is-already-in-trouble/92660