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MyMedicare is a scheme that encourages patients to register with a regular GP practice to improve their health. But few patients have enrolled.
Since its launch in October 2023, only about 10% of patients have signed up.
The Albanese government’s 2023-24 budget allocated A$19.7 million over four years to implement MyMedicare. So if we are to get value for money from the scheme, we need to find out why patients are not signing up, and address any barriers to them doing so.
Other countries have similar schemes, as we outline in recent research. Here’s what we can learn from these to boost uptake of MyMedicare in Australia.
What is MyMedicare?
MyMedicare is a voluntary patient registration scheme. Patients nominate a GP or GP practice as their preferred provider and see the same GP or health-care team over time, a concept known as “continuity of care”.
Continuity of care is linked to earlier detection of health issues, better management of chronic (long-term) conditions, fewer avoidable hospital visits, and improved patient satisfaction.
Patients registered for MyMedicare have longer telehealth consultations. People living in residential aged care have more regular visits from their GP. From July this year, GP practices may offer patients more support for their chronic diseases.
There are also benefits for GP clinics that sign up for MyMedicare. They receive incentives to offer certain patients longer telehealth consultations. Practices also receive incentives to manage the health of registered aged care patients.
These incentives help practices invest in improved services and resources. From July, this may include better chronic disease management and enhanced team-based care (for instance, better liaison between GPs and allied health workers as part of someone’s health team).
How many patients have signed up?
Since MyMedicare’s launch in 2023 until March 19 this year, more than 2.6 million patients have registered for MyMedicare, according to Department of Health and Aged Care statistics provided to The Conversation.
That’s about 10% of Australia’s population. This raises concerns about how aware patients are of the scheme, how engaged they are with it, and possible barriers to registration.
GP practices that provide services to patients who would benefit from the new longer telehealth services or provide care to people in aged care were encouraged to register those patients in MyMedicare as a priority. So perhaps other patients have yet to sign up.
GP practices have been quicker to sign up. Since its launch, health department statistics provided to The Conversation show 6,469 practices had registered for MyMedicare until March 19 this year.
That’s about 80% of GP practices in Australia.
Who’s most likely to register?
We don’t know which patient groups sign up for MyMedicare. The health department told The Conversation patients can provide details of their sex, location (such as metropolitan, regional, rural and remote areas), linguistic background, and disabilities when they sign up. But this is voluntary, and these data have only been available for collection since March 2024.
However, here’s what we learned when we looked at other countries’ patient enrolment schemes:
- men are less likely to enrol than women, and recent immigrants have significantly lower registration rates compared to long-term residents. These highlight potential barriers to access for certain populations
- patients in suburban, rural or small urban areas have higher registration rates, whereas those in large metropolitan centres and lower socioeconomic groups register less
- patients with mental illness or substance use disorders have lower registration rates, pointing to challenges in engaging vulnerable populations.
How do other countries do it?
We also looked at how other countries set up their schemes to see what we can learn.
New Zealand: high uptake through financial incentives
New Zealand has successfully implemented a voluntary patient registration system by offering incentives to enrolled patients. These include lower co-payments for consultations and cheaper prescriptions.
This approach encourages people to register with a general practice rather than a specific GP. Some 95% of the population was registered by January 2025.
Quebec, Canada: tailored registration programs, but low uptake
Quebec has several voluntary registration programs for different groups of patients. These include ones for family medicine, vulnerable patients and a general program.
However, registration rate remains low, at 14.7-32.2%, depending on the program.
British Columbia, Canada: incentive-driven registration
British Columbia offers three voluntary registration programs – one for chronic diseases, another for complex care and a general program.
These use “capitation funding”, where GPs receive payments based on the number of patients they care for.
Participation rates vary widely across the three programs, with 45.5-79% of the population registered.
The differences in registration rates across these systems highlight the importance of how schemes are designed and implemented.
What can Australia learn?
If MyMedicare is to improve access and continuity of care, targeted strategies – such as outreach for immigrants and lower-income groups, and better support for people with mental health issues – will be essential.
Australia could also look to how countries with higher rates of patients signing up have designed their systems. This could include considering whether more financial incentives for patients to enrol is warranted, which has been successful in New Zealand.
Jialing Lin is a Research fellow with the International Centre for Future Health Systems, UNSW Sydney.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The statements or opinions expressed in this article reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the AMA, the MJA or InSight+ unless so stated.
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Thanks for the article. It appears the financial benefits outlined in the article have not been well researched by the author. The actual financial incentives are actually very small for the effort to register a patient for MyMedicare. Its even harder to register a patient who is a resident of a Residential Aged Care Home since many will have a degree of cognitive impairment, they will not have access to a computer to go online and arrange the registration, or the family member will need the GP to explain the process, and even then its hard to explain the real benefit to a family member of a RACH resident when you are already the regular GP….what will they say if its simply “I will get paid more”…that will not cut it. “I will now be providing better care to your mother if she registers” sounds like black mail! My point is for these types of initiates, the sign up process must very easy for all people, not just the tech savvy people. There are a number of steps to be taken and I have discussed this with my team, and in a busy day in a 10 GP practice, its hard to add the extra time at the front desk for the team to check people’s understanding of the MyMedicare registration process, and to support them through the process. In my healthcare consulting work, It desk have found the smaller practices (2 GP) have had more success with registration as the front desk workload is reported to be less frantic. The clarity of the benefits for MyMedicare to patient, practice and individual GP are not great enough currently to out weigh the friction involved for registration. Early on in the planning for this registration it was mooted there would be $150 per person per year as an annual payment in addition to usual access to Medicare. That is the type of incentive that will lead to innovation in how practices use the non fee for service funding of registration. If you review the health care home final report, difficulty with registration was a barrier, as well as lack of clarity of benefits, and lack of clarity of the long term plan…when implementing new programs, the Department of Health does not seem to learn from its previous pilots to improve implementation. All the information is there to learn from.
Maybe both patients and Drs are concerned that this is the thin end of the wedge of capitation. We all have friends and relatives overseas who are frustrated and distressed by being forced to rely on a GP with whom they are not satisfied (for a myriad of reasons) and overseas colleagues are similarly disillusioned by lack of appropriate remuneration whilst struggling to service a patient population demographically loaded with elderly and socially disadvantaged patients.