As the end of year approaches, there’s an efficient way to update the business details of GPs and other healthcare providers moving in and out of your practice. The free Provider Connect Australiaâ„¢ (also known as PCAâ„¢), an initiative of the Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency), provides a single place to update your business information and services, which can automatically update your National Health Service Directory (NHSD) listing and your local Primary Health Network.
PCAâ„¢ reduces data entry duplication and improves the accuracy and quality of healthcare service information. It lets you provide consistent, up-to-date information about healthcare services to funders, health service directories, communications services, and other key partners in your healthcare service delivery.
The use of PCAâ„¢ can significantly reduce the time spent updating business partners, ensures that updates are not missed, and reduces transcription errors that can occur with manual updates. PCAâ„¢ creates unique identifiers for healthcare services, service delivery locations and practitioners’ service delivery roles, allowing these to be reliably identified and linked across the healthcare system. These unique identifiers complement existing national identifiers for healthcare provider organisations and individuals.
Once registered, you can update your business information and it will automatically be sent to your registered business partners. This means you can maintain a single master copy of your organisation’s details and your chosen business partners will automatically receive any updates.
To date, more than 1,900 healthcare organisations across Australia are using PCAâ„¢ and a growing number of business partners are coming on board. The more business partners that come onboard, will ensure that PCAâ„¢ is a very valuable healthcare provider resource. Over time, business partners will include pathology and radiology services, public service directories, secure messaging providers, insurers and more.
Look out for details about a Provider Connect Australiaâ„¢ webinar that the Primary Health Network is holding in early 2024.
