Provider Connect Australia (also known as PCA) is an initiative of the Australian Digital Health Agency to support healthcare organisations in updating their practice and practitioner information in a single source.
It connects healthcare organisations with their business partners to streamline updates of the service they provide and the practitioners that provide them.
A healthcare organisation has several business partners which could include:
- health service directories
- Medicare or private health insurers
- secure messaging services
- public and private hospitals
- + more
When practice or practitioner information needs to be updated, it can be extremely time-consuming and hard to track across all the different partners. Keeping all these business partner’s records updated can be critical to business operations.
The best way to keep them all up to date with no mismatched information, is by updating information through one platform – PCA – and publishing to many.
There have been a number of recent welcomed changes to PCA including:
New data fields such as:
- Taking new patients status – allows healthcare providers to indicate and publish to relevant business partner (eg. National Health Services Directory (NHSD) that they are taking new patients.
- Healthcare service description – provides opportunity to publish a short description alongside the healthcare service to explain what the service entails.
- Initial Assessment and Referral (IAR) rating – utilised by mental health services to indicate what levels of care they offer. Learn more about IAR.
- Business partners now have the ability to create tasks to prompt healthcare organisation to update information. They must meet the Fast Healthcare Interoperability (FHIR) standard with an application programming interface (API) to be able to utilise this functionality.
- Clinical information and management systems are now able to begin developing software integrations with PCA.
Upcoming PCA training webinar – Wed 3 July, 7-8pm
We invite general practice, specialists, allied health, nurses and pharmacy to an upcoming webinar co-hosted with several NSW Primary Health Networks (PHNs) and in partnership with the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA).
The webinar will cover the above update and changes, an overview of PCA and ADHA representative, Jai Wedel, will provide a live demonstration covering access, registration, setup and linking to business partners.