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Strengthening Medicare – MyMedicare – Voluntary Patient Registration

Evidence demonstrates that seeing the same GP and healthcare team regularly leads to better health outcomes.1 

The Strengthening Medicare Taskforce Report builds on the Primary Health Care 10 Year Plan (2022-2032) and sets out the vision and pathway to achieving a world-class health system with primary care at its center. One of the first Strengthening Medicare initiatives introduced was MyMedicare – a new voluntary patient registration (VPR) model. It aims to strengthen the relationship between patients, their general practice, general practitioner (GP) and primary care teams. Registration in MyMedicare is voluntary for patients, practices, and providers.

Though registration is voluntary for the patient, practice and provider, this initiative provides an opportunity for general practices to establish a ‘medical’ home enabling effective delivery of clinical resources, coordination of care and comprehensive health management.

This activity focuses on actionable steps to support general practice and the General Practitioner MyMedicare registration process and to identify patients who will benefit most from early registration and participation in the MyMedicare initiative.

This activity is foundational to implementing MyMedicare incentives. These currently include:

  • Access to longer MBS funded telephone calls and the triple bulk billing incentive for longer telehealth consultations (Nov 2023)
  • General Practitioner Aged Care Incentive (GPACI) (August 2024).

Increase the percentage of practice population that is registered with MyMedicare to the practice.

To achieve this goal, you can access a range of resources:

  1. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has created a hub of resources which includes a range of communication resources, guides and factsheets:
  2. Access MyMedicare eLearning from Services Australia.

Kickstart your quality improvement activity by bringing together a quality improvement team. Together, you’ll identify the key challenges and come up with innovative solutions, ensuring you all share a clear understanding of the improvement objectives and strategies.

  1. Engage with your Primary Health Coordinator from CCQ; they can offer tailored support, resources and guidance to enhance your QI efforts wherever you are in your QI journey. Your Primary Health Coordinator can support your practice to:
      • Bring a QI team together to decide on an improvement idea
      • Plan, start and finish a QI activity
      • Facilitate QI meetings
      • Create practice-wide systems improvement
  1. Gather data and information. Review current practice data and processes for registering patients.
  2. Identify and discuss any common barriers to patient registration. Consider using process maps, flow charts or driver diagrams to generate change ideas and improve processes.

What data might you need? You’ll need data to understand the problem and measure your outcomes. We suggest you start with:

  1. Primary Sense can provide insight, detailed reports, and targeted guidance on improving data quality. The following reports are available within Primary Sense:
    • Voluntary Patient Registration: Identifies patients ‘at risk’ who would benefit from enrolment.
    • Clinical software: Ensure your data quality practices are up to date, including diagnostic coding and active/inactive patients. This is important to being able to identify patients accurately.

To achieve your goal, you can consider several improvement ideas such as:

  1. Utilise the Primary Sense report ‘Voluntary Patient Registration’ to send out communications to the highest priority patients to register with practice through MyMedicare. Consider starting small by targeting only one GPs patient cohort.
  2. Run a patient education campaign to inform patients about the value and importance of registering with MyMedicare to the practice.
  3. Utilise the Primary Sense report ‘Voluntary Patient Registration’ to flag identified patients in the system and develop a communications plan to opportunistically enrol patients when they present to the practice.
  4. Develop a workflow so that patients can discuss MyMedicare registration during key appointment types such as care plans or health assessments.

Remember to self-report your QI project as a CPD activity. QI is a great tool for measuring tangible outcomes and demonstrating improvement in patient care!

Share your results with your CCQ practice support team and with your patients. Ensure you document your quality improvement activity to meet PIP QI guidelines and for CPD purposes.

References

  1. O’Malley, A. S. (2018). Can continuity of care in primary care be sustained? Australian Journal of General Practice, 47(10), 706-709. Available at: https://www1.racgp.org.au/ajgp/2018/october/can-continuity-of-care-in-primary-care
Download PDSA Template

Ready to begin this QI activity?

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait IslandersCCQ acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live, and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures; and to Elders past, present and emerging.

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