Using My Health Record in aged care

Advance care planning involves planning for future health care and is relevant for all persons with the capacity to consent. It enables people to make some decisions now about the health care they would or would not like to receive if they were to become seriously ill and unable to communicate their preferences or make treatment decisions. It provides the opportunity to think about, discuss and record a person’s preferences for the type of care they would like to receive and the outcomes they would consider acceptable. There is currently no national repository for advance care planning documents with documents stored by individuals, on hospital systems, jurisdictional repositories and others, for example, lawyers.

My Health Record has the functionality to support the uploading of advance care planning documents onto a person’s record for future reference. The Australian Digital Health Agency, through the release of Aged Care Industry Offers, has partnered with software vendors operating in aged care to enhance their products to be conformant with My Health Record. The First Aged Care Industry Offer concluded in 2023 and resulted in 13 software vendors with products now conformant with My Health Record. The Second Aged Care Industry Offer commenced in January 2024 and the Agency is currently working with nine software vendors to achieve conformance with My Health Record and the Aged Care Transfer Summary functionality. This uplift, in addition to building the necessary functionality in Clinical Information Systems used in residential aged care, will facilitate the upload of advanced care planning documentation to My Health Record. This will ensure an elderly person living in residential aged care can have their preferences safely and securely stored so they are accessible to family and healthcare providers so their preferences can be actioned if indicated.

For more details, please download the National Guidelines on using My Health Record to store and access advance care planning goals of care documents.