Quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > Greg Twyford wrote: > > > Maybe I'm thick, or I've missed something, but I can't see for the life of > me > how specialists will get interested in messaging with GPs on a widespread > basis > unless they can receive referrals electronically as well. > > Specialists aren't interested in receiving referrals electronically and if I > were a specialist I would prefer the lower transactional costs of a piece of > paper than an encrypted email that I had to keep for ?7 years. Let me regurgitate some points from this list and others in the past: AFAICT the issue is with any out-of-band (i.e separate to the patient) transmission of the referral: it generates a medico-legal responsibility on the recipient which far outweighs the cost of filing paper. Electronic path requests and scripts fall down for the same reason.
Individual certificates are unacceptable primarily because they come with a contract for which formal legal advice is "you would have to be insane to sign that", secondarily they come on a dongle which is Windows-only. If you really wanted electronic referral, you'd be better off burning a 30c CD- ROM containing a PIT file and free copies of Argus/Wagtail, and signing the label to make it a Medicare-legit referral. > I am currently in the early stages of negotiating an ADSL line for one of > our ophthalmogists. He rightly points out that the benefit of electronic data > transfer will accrue to me. I will therefore undertake to be responsible for > the > installation and first year's costs for his ADSL account. It's all part of > our > "Adopt a Specialist" program. Good for you, David. We only need a critical mass of specialists to sign up, power of referral can be used to push the rest into line. There is probably be some holdouts (I expect most psychiatrists will be sending written reports in 2020, certainly I haven't seen any crypto option on the table which is good enough for their content) Ian _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
