AU Patient Summary Consumer Journeys
These Consumer Journeys have been developed by the Sparked AU Patient Summary Clinical Focus Group (AU PS CFG) on behalf of the Sparked CDG.
They have been developed to help illustrate the interactions and use of a patient summary during a consumer’s healthcare journey, and to tease out questions around the use of the patient summary, including workflow, policy, infrastructure, etc. Questions that have been raised during the development of the Consumer Journeys have been collated as “Hairy Questions” to feed into AU Patient Summary implementation and policy discussions.
The Consumer Journeys have been used by the AU Patient Summary FHIR project (a project under the AU Core Technical Design Group) to develop technical use cases for as focused snapshots along the journeys.
These Consumer Journeys are unbound by current system capabilities and can be used for reference when considering the development and implementation of an AU Patient Summary in Australia.
The versions below are current as of February 2025.
Hairy Questions
The list of questions below (“Hairy Questions”) have been raised by the Sparked AU Patient Summary CFG.
These questions require consideration and action outside of the AU PS CFG forum.
Questions may include technical clarification, policy or guideline requirements, specific workflow/implementation requirements, or other items requiring further investigation or exposition
| Hairy Questions | Related journey |
| How is the link provided? Via token, record locator service | Interstate GP Visit |
| Is this a snapshot or dynamically derived? | Interstate GP Visit |
| Is the PS auto generated or manually curated? | Interstate GP Visit |
| What is the step between sending a request and receiving a PS? | Emergency Hospital Attendance |
| How do ambulance services access patient summary? | Emergency Hospital Attendance |
| How does this process work if you are requesting after hours? | Emergency Hospital Attendance |
| Only view PS or are they updating the record? Consider rural and remote where no GP on site – there is a need to provide equitable and timely care – allied health need to be able to update… | Referral to Specialist & Allied Health |
| Is it the PS at time of referral or most recent if there is a delay or a change made? | Referral to Specialist & Allied Health |
| Where are the patient summaries coming from? E.g. usual GP? | Referral to Specialist & Allied Health |
| How does the dietitian see the updated medication dose? | Referral to Specialist & Allied Health |
| PS from usual GP & discharge summary –is there a combined PS?? | Hospital to Aged Care Interstate Transfer |
| Where is the data? Is it with the patient, clinic or is it sitting in space? | Hospital to Aged Care Interstate Transfer |
| Should a referral always contain both a snapshot at the time of referring and a link to the most up to date? | Pre-operative Surgical Journey |
| Is it intended that the patient summary be shared by the consumer where possible? Or is there to be a retrieval service where the GP can retrieve the most recent patient summary. | Interstate GP Visit – AU PS FHIR IG Project Feedback |
| Is it the intent to update and only have one patient summary active or to have many iterations that are date stamped? | Referral to Specialist & Allied Health – AU PS FHIR IG Project Feedback |
| How do auditors know the referral details at the time of triage in order to be able to assess for appropriateness of referral triage? | Referral to Specialist & Allied Health – AU PS FHIR IG Project Feedback |
| Could there be an option to select the “version” at the time of referral versus “current”? | Referral to Specialist & Allied Health – AU PS FHIR IG Project Feedback |
| How is a distinction made between a shared custodianship PS and individual clinician-maintained PS? | Referral to Specialist & Allied Health – AU PS FHIR IG Project Feedback |
| Which system is used to update/access the patient summary during the Aged Care intake, is this the Aged Care system, the GP system, both? Can the patient summary support the challenge of maintaining data across both systems? | Aged Care Interstate Transfer |
| Can a patient summary be handed over? | |
| Is there a record of who accessed a PS and when? | |
| Privacy and confidentiality management | |
| Who is responsible for the PS – where is the legal responsibility? | |
| Patient interactions with this – needs to be defined? |