PCA is a service that will distribute your information to the services you deal with (business partners). PCA will allow you to update all of your business partners at once, in one place. Your business partners may include the NHSD, secure messaging partners, and your local Primary Health Network (PHN).
PCA connects healthcare provider organisations with their business partners to streamline updates of the services they provide and those that provide them. PCA will significantly reduce time that healthcare provider organisations spend updating their business partners, and ensures important updates are not missed, and reduces transcription errors that occur with manual updates.
PCA creates unique identifiers for healthcare services, service delivery locations and practitioners’ service delivery roles, which allows these to be easily identified and linked across the healthcare system. PCA will be the ‘one stop shop’ for healthcare organisations to maintain their details with their business partners.
- Lowering cost of processing client information
- Lowering cost of processing client updates
- Improved client satisfaction
- Streamlined client registration and updates
- Improved timeliness, completeness and accuracy of client data
- Improved reliability of healthcare organisation information
- Improved patient care
Additionally, manually notifying business partners whenever a healthcare providers service delivery details change can lead to human error with common impacts including the below. PCA will aid in eliminating this.
- Time poor staff only notifying highest priority partners
- Not notifying when practitioners leave the organisation- which results in referrals and reports not reaching the intended healthcare provider
- Errors made in manual completion of forms and further errors made on transcribing the information into partners systems
- Poor useability of secure messaging
The security of PCA is a key design element and strongly adheres to the Australian Government security requirements. Because of this, the registration process will take some time to complete, but this will only need to be done once. It is key to note that registering for PCA establishes your agreement to allow the Australian Digital Health Agency, as the operator of PCA, to collect and share information on your behalf (to your chosen business partners).
See the Pre-registration Checklist to make sure you’re ready and then follow the registration steps to register your organisation with PCA. A key step in registering for PCA is ensuring you have a PRODA account. If you do not have one, see this HPOS page on how to create an account.
There are 4 main steps to fully register for PCA. Follow the links below and complete each sub-step within.
- Pre-registration checklist
- Register your organisation
- Set up your organisation
- Maintain organisation details
If you are interested to know what business partners are currently part of PCA that you can share information with, you can check via the PCA website and scrolling to the Participating Business Partners section.
If you need any assistance during the registration process or would like to know more about PCA, please contact help@digitalhealth.gov.au or call 1300 901 001 between 8am- 5pm AEST Monday- Friday. Alternatively, you may contact your local PHN.