What is MyMedicare: Your MyMedicare Administration Guide

Here you’ll find everything you need to know about MyMedicare. You can also learn more about the MyMedicare program through a series of short videos here.

MyMedicare is a voluntary patient registration system / program that strengthens the relationship between you, your patients, and your broader healthcare team. At its core, MyMedicare seeks to formalise the relationship between your patients and with your practice, allowing you to deliver truly personalised health services.

Why should I sign up for MyMedicare?

When patients register with your practice through MyMedicare, it unlocks new opportunities for longer telehealth consultations, dedicated support for chronic conditions, and access to future benefits.

Benefits to registering your practice include:

Greater continuity of care, leading to better health outcomes
Extended MBS-funded telehealth consultations (level C and D), including triple bulk billing incentives for longer calls (Level C, D and E) for children under 16, pensioners and concession card holders
Coming later in 2024 – enhanced primary care delivery, including a new incentive for proactive care for residential aged care patients

Benefits for patients include:

Longer Medicare-funded telehealth consultations for increased convenience and support
Increased engagement leading to tailored treatments based on their unique needs including improved chronic disease management
Coming in August 2024 – more regular GP visits and improved care planning for residential aged care patients
Coming later in 2024 – improved engagement with GPs for those who regularly visit hospital

Which patients are eligible to register for MyMedicare with my practice?

All Australians with a Medicare card or DVA card can register for MyMedicare. Registered patients can nominate your general practice as their regular practice if they’ve had two face-to-face consultations within the past 24 months, or one for those in remote locations (Modified Monash Model (MMM) 6 and 7 locations).

Patients facing hardship are exempt from the eligibility criteria. Families can also join together – parents/guardians and children can be registered at the same practice if either is eligible and enrolled.

To identify if a patient has children that can be registered under MyMedicare, please make sure you have linked the child to the parent in Pracsoft. (ref: Adding families of patients – Pracsoft userguide)

Full eligibility information can be found here.

You can help and encourage your patients to register for MyMedicare and nominate you as their preferred practice by providing them with the information, resources and instructions on how to self-register.

You can help patient’s register by:

Initiating their registration within MyMedicare which will trigger a registration in their Medicare Online Account (myGov) or the Express Plus Medicare mobile app.
Providing them with a paper registration form – MyMedicare Patient Registration Form (health.gov.au)

Patients can also join MyMedicare independently through their Medicare Online Account (myGov) or the Express Plus Medicare mobile app.

How to mark patients as registered in MedicalDirector Clinical and Pracsoft version 4.3

The Clinical and Pracsoft version 4.3 upgrade is now available for download and includes a new MyMedicare Enrollment Status field.

See the full release notes here and start your upgrade here.

Importing MyMedicare patient enrollment status from HPOS into Clinical version 4.3

You can update the MyMedicare enrollment status of all your Clinical and Pracsoft patients simultaneously using the MyMedicare Import Wizard.

To get started, you need to access and download a list of MyMedicare registered patients from HPOS (PRODA).

There are three key steps, shown below, which are excerpts from the Services Australia eLearning module MyMedicare – Managing patient registrations.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

IMPORTANT: Select “Export Complete Registration List” (not “Export Pending Registration List”) as the MyMedicare Import Wizard is designed to import the full list only.

MyMedicare Import Wizard in Clinical

The MyMedicare Import Wizard is designed to import the .CSV file provided to you by Services Australia.

You can see which patients were successfully updated in your patient database and which were not, providing you with an opportunity to locate and update these patient records manually in your Clinical/Pracsoft database.

You can then run the import wizard again to update the remaining patients.

IMPORTANT: The MyMedicare Import Wizard works with Clinical and Pracsoft 4.3 and later.

The General Practice in Aged Care Incentive supports older people living in residential aged care. This will help them receive quality primary care services from their regular provider and practice.

Find out more about the General Practice in Aged Care Incentive here

See the full General Practice in Aged Care Incentive Guidelines – July 2024

Watch the Cubiko / MedicalDirector webinar recording – MyMedicare General Practice Aged Care Incentive

Telstra Health’s Smart Visual Dashboards, which is available to all Pracsoft users, equips you with valuable reports and graphs for your practice.

We’re excited to announce that a new MyMedicare metric has been built within the Appointments tab of your Smart Visual Dashboards to assist your practice in identifying eligible patients for MyMedicare

You can identify eligible patients quickly, prioritise those who can benefit most, and monitor registrations effortlessly.

SMS is a great way to invite patients to register for MyMedicare with your practice, as well as keeping them across appointment confirmations and medication reminders. If you’re new to SMS patient communications, you read how SMS candeliver safe and efficient patient care here.

How to get started on Smart Visual Dashboards

To request access to your Smart Visual Dashboard, go to the ‘Reports’ drop down menu in your Pracsoft software, then click on ‘Smart Visual Dashboards’ and follow the prompts to submit your expression of interest.

How to find the new MyMedicare metric in Smart Visual Dashboards

Login to Smart Visual Dashboards within Pracsoft (click on Reporting and select Smart Visual Dashboards from the drop-down menu)
Login with your username & password provided at setup
Once logged in, select ‘Appointments’ from the left-hand pane to access the new metric and navigate to ‘Patients eligible for MyMedicare’

This will show you the number of patients eligible to register for MyMedicare. By clicking on the number of patients, you will be able to further narrow down the patients:

By practitioner
Upcoming appointments
Appointment type
Whether they have had a Chronic Disease diagnosis, which makes them eligible for longer telehealth consultations.

You can also mark a patient as ‘Contacted’ from within the metric in your Visual Dashboards.

You can see Smart Visual Dashboards in action in our 3 minute video demo.