Oculo and HealthLink have signed an agreement to facilitate the flow of referrals from General Practitioners into Oculo’s optometrist users through secure electronic messaging. Oculo is a clinical communications platform for eye care. It has almost 300 ophthalmologists and 800 optometrists across Australia and is growing daily.

“Primary eye care needs to happen in the community,” says Kate Taylor, Oculo’s CEO. “We know that about half of people with diabetes and glaucoma aren’t getting adequate eye care. Making it easier for GPs to connect patients in to eye care services can help that. Making it seamless and secure is critical.”

HealthLink’s core focus is on ensuring that electronic communication processes are put in place to give patients certainty that their information has been appropriately handled.

“This is HealthLink’s first foray into optometry, although we already support many ophthalmology practices across Australia and New Zealand. Our partnership philosophy is to work with experts in specialized fields of healthcare information technology and together to build world-class systems,” says Tom Bowden, CEO and co-founder of HealthLink.

Dr Taylor explains, “Our vision is to link the eye care ecosystem – everyone who helps patients have the best vision and best eye care. This goes beyond ophthalmologists and optometrists to connecting GPs, hospital eye services and low vision support organizations to all work together with patients at the heart of it all.”

She continues, “We think the timing of this partnership with HealthLink is particularly apt, given yesterday’s release of the RACGP’s position statement on electronic communication and call for the phasing out of paper-based communications like faxes within three years.”[i]

About HealthLink:

HealthLink is an electronic communications and integration service that is used by all of the organisations within the health sector to exchange electronic patient information via their computer systems. HealthLink is used by more than 13,500 medical practices across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region. The company has offices in Auckland, Brisbane, Townsville, Sydney and Wollongong. HealthLink has a growing presence in every Australian State and territory as well as an almost complete coverage of the New Zealand health sector. For more information contact or see www.healthlink.net

About Oculo:

Oculo is an internet-based secure messaging service to connect clinical communications between eye care professionals. It grew out of the Centre for Eye Research Australia. Oculo’s aim is to promote the efficiency and quality of clinical communications – and ultimately to help deliver the best possible care to eye patients so that they may enjoy the best possible sight. Over 3 million people in Australia and New Zealand have or are at risk of blinding eye diseases and need regular eye checks. Eye care professionals can provide better care with secure, auditable and shared clinical records, including clinical imagery. For more information, see oculo.com.au

Australia and New Zealand’s largest health system integrator HealthLink has this week released the MyHealthLink portal, a stand-alone system designed to enable smaller medical practices and individual healthcare provider organisations to utilize the SmartForms technology that is currently in the process of transforming health sector communications.

The first release of MyHealthLink has been for the purpose of supporting the CareConnect eReferrals system.  CareConnect is in the process of making eReferrals mandatory for healthcare provider organisations referring patients to Auckland’s three district health boards.

Until now, the only systems capable of sending SmartForms have been the major general practice and specialists’ electronic medical records software of both countries.  In order to use HealthLink’s SmartForms, practices have had to be using an electronic medical record system (EMR) with either a HISO compliant (New Zealand) or an Aduro compliant (Australia) interface.  Current SmartForms users include nearly all general practices and the majority of specialists.  Now the MyHealthLink portal will expand the availability of SmartForms to a number of smaller medical organisations that do not have Aduro or HISO compliant EMR systems. Eventually, using MyHealthLink, smaller organisations will be able to do electronic referrals, order pathology and radiology services and send an increasing number of insurance and work-cover related medical certificates.

Initially MyHealthLink will be used by healthcare providers within the Auckland region which has recently confirmed that it will require all incoming referrals to be electronic from March 2017.  Already a number of dentists, allied healthcare providers and specialists have registered to use the new system, in readiness for moving their referral processes from paper-based to electronic, ahead of the March deadline. In the first week since the service launch was announced more than 50 organisations applied to use the service and are currently going through an ‘on-boarding’ process.

HealthLink’s objective is to transfer entire healthcare regions from using paper based processes to fully electronic ones.  The technology is now there to make that change but completely transforming important processes such as referrals from paper based to electronic requires a disciplined approach.  Success is also dependent upon highly effective teamwork between the key healthcare provider organisations and their technology partners.

“Achieving total, system-wide transition is what HealthLink is about.  That is where we are positioning ourselves.  Our customers are telling us that they don’t want a partially electronic solution, they want to transform their region fully.
MyHealthLink is an important tool for achieving complete end-to-end regional transformation.”

About HealthLink:

HealthLink is an electronic communications and integration service that is used by all of the organisations within the health sector to exchange electronic patient information via their computer systems. HealthLink’s core focus is on ensuring that electronic communication processes are put in place to give patients certainty that their information has been appropriately handled. HealthLink is used by more than 13,500 medical practices across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region. The company has offices in Auckland, Brisbane, Townsville, Sydney and Wollongong. HealthLink has a growing presence in every Australian State and territory as well as an almost complete coverage of the New Zealand health sector. For more information contact or see www.healthlink.net