The Department of Health and the Australian Medical Association (AMA) have agreed to work together on changes to the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS).
Minister for Health and Aged Care, Greg Hunt said the cooperation recognised that some changes would be complex and require additional time to flow through systems to support high quality patient care and informed financial consent.
The changes follow the report of the MBS Review Taskforce which completed its activity in June 2020, providing more than 60 reports outlining almost 1,400 recommendations on how to modernise the MBS, align it with contemporary clinical practice, and improve patient access and outcomes.
Mr Hunt said that to date, the process had delivered access to high quality, contemporary medical services, reflecting up-to-date medical practice and ensuring patient safety through removing obsolete items.
“The latest changes include updates to orthopaedic, cardiac and general surgery to better reflect modern practice, reduce low value care and incentivise advanced techniques with improved patient outcomes,” Mr Hunt said.
He said the MBS review process began in 2015, now having reviewed more than 5,700 items.
“It will now shift to a more business-as-usual footing, embedding a new continuous review into the ongoing management of the MBS schedule as recommended by the MBS Review Taskforce,” Mr Hunt said.
“We will continue to work with the health insurance and hospital sector to implement improvements to administrative processes to allow time for all patients to have informed financial consent, including insurance rebates, before their procedures.”
He said the Out of Pocket Costs website, first established in 2018, would be expanded to further support patient choice and informed financial consent.
President of the AMA, Omar Khorshid (pictured) said the AMA supported the review process and welcomed the commitment by the Government to work on process changes to give additional time between public notice of the items and implementation.
“The goal of these changes is to ensure that while changing the MBS, we provide all the information a patient and a doctor needed about Medicare and insurer rebates to provide informed financial consent,” Dr Khorshid said.
