Secure messaging
Ensuring the safe, seamless and secure exchange of clinical information between healthcare providers.
What is secure messaging?
The need for healthcare providers to connect to each other safely and securely is greater than ever.
Secure messaging is a core foundational capability required to enable interoperability and safe, seamless, secure, and confidential information sharing across all healthcare providers.
Secure messaging supports the delivery of messages containing clinical documents and/or other information between healthcare organisations, sent either directly or through one or more secure messaging providers.
The use of post, fax and email to share patient and clinical information puts it at risk.
What are the benefits?
Healthcare providers may benefit through:
- Improved timeliness for the sending and receipt of referrals and clinical information
- Improved clinical decisions due to the right information being available at the point of care
- Access to a broader range of referring practitioners
- Streamlined administration due to reduction in paper-based processes
- Improved coordination of care as a result of improved communication between healthcare providers
- Confidence in privacy and security of transmitted patient data
- Improved traceability and tracking of information for audit purposes.
Patients may benefit through:
- Patient data being appropriately and securely managed
- A reduced need to retell the same information
- Confidential patient correspondence only being seen by treating clinicians
- Improved clinical decisions due to the right information being available at the point of care
- A more streamlined patient experience overall.
Your practice managers may benefit through:
- A single channel through which referrals and correspondence are sent or received
- Reduced overheads and more cost-effective delivery of service from reduced use of paper correspondence and postage costs
- Improved coordination of care and service integration
- Reduction in clerical error rates through reduced manual data collection
- Improved practice efficiency from reduction in scanning and faxing.
Why implement secure messaging?
The exact specifics of what your practice can receive through secure messaging will be dependent on your clinical information system. However, most systems allow you to send or receive referrals, specialist reports, pathology results, radiology results, hospital discharge summaries and allied health consultation reports.
Secure messaging eliminates the need for re-keying or transcribing, integrates more efficiently into clinical workflows, provides a single channel for correspondence and enables an audit trail of successful delivery. Additionally, secure messaging provides time and cost savings through integration with clinical software, automation of tasks and postage cost savings.
An economic analysis undertaken as part of the development of the National Digital Health Strategy has estimated the gross economic benefit of secure messaging could be around $2 billion over four years and more than $9 billion over 10 years.