On 1 July 2026 something changed in Australian healthcare that most people have not been told about directly. Pathology and diagnostic imaging reports are now uploaded to My Health Record by default, rather than only when a provider chose to.
Most are there within 24 hours of being finalised. Which means that for a great many Australians, the blood test result now arrives in their record before the phone call about it.
That is a genuinely good change and it is also a disorienting one. This is what actually happens now, what you will see and when, and what to do if you would rather a particular result did not go in.
Disclosure: I am a doctor and I founded exora, which is software for holding your own health record. It appears briefly near the end and nothing before it depends on using anything.
What changed
Before July, uploading a pathology or imaging report to My Health Record was something a provider could do. Now it is something they must do, for most written reports, unless a specific exception applies. The change is backed by the strongest lever the system has: Medicare benefits for certain pathology and imaging services are payable only when the required information has been uploaded.
Two clarifications worth having straight away.
It is the report, not the picture. A radiologist’s written findings go into your record. The actual X-ray, CT or MRI images do not. If you want the images themselves - and you sometimes will, for a second opinion - you still have to ask the imaging practice for them.
It covers written reports from a pathologist or radiologist. That is most of what you would think of as “my results”:
- Blood and urine tests.
- Biopsies, cervical screening and genetic testing.
- X-ray, ultrasound, CT, MRI, mammogram and PET reports.
When you will see it, and the five-day pause
Most pathology reports are uploaded within 24 hours of being finalised and are visible to you as soon as they arrive.
Some are held back for five days before you can see them - anatomical pathology, cytopathology and genetic testing. That delay used to be seven days and was shortened as part of the same reforms.
It is worth understanding why that pause exists rather than resenting it, because the categories are not arbitrary. Those three are where the results that change lives tend to live: the biopsy, the cervical screening, the genetic panel. The five days are there so that a clinician has a reasonable chance to reach you first and explain it, rather than you meeting the word “carcinoma” alone on a phone at eleven at night.
Reasonable people disagree about whether five days is the right number. But that is the trade being made, and knowing it is the trade makes the wait easier to sit with.
Seeing a result before your doctor calls
This is the part people are not prepared for, and it is now normal rather than exceptional.
A few things are worth holding onto. An abnormal flag is not a diagnosis. Reference ranges are built so that a percentage of perfectly well people fall outside them by definition, and a single marginal value on one test is one of the least alarming things in medicine. Trends matter more than points. A result that has been the same for six years is information; the same number seen once, cold, is not. And the report was written for a clinician, not for you - the language is compressed and hedged in ways that read as more ominous than intended.
If a result worries you, the useful move is to ring the practice and ask when the doctor will review it, rather than to spend a weekend reading. That is not a fob-off. It is the sequence that gets you an answer from someone who can see the rest of your history.
How to keep a result out of your record
You still control this, and there are four ways depending on when you act.
Before the test is the clean one. Tell your doctor, the collection centre or the hospital that you do not want this result uploaded. Say it as early as you can, ideally when the test is being ordered. A patient request is one of the recognised exceptions, and the provider writes it down.
After it is uploaded, you can remove a document from your record yourself, through myGov or the 1800MEDICARE app.
You can restrict access rather than remove, so a document stays in your record but is hidden from providers unless you give them the access code.
And you can still opt out of My Health Record entirely, which stops all of it. That is a bigger decision than it sounds, because the record is also what a hospital sees about you when you cannot speak for yourself, but it remains your call.
The three other exceptions that let a provider withhold a report are narrower: you have no My Health Record, the treating clinician judges there is a serious risk in uploading, or it is technically impossible. Each has to be documented and kept for two years.
What this is actually worth
It is easy to read all this as surveillance. I would read it the other way.
For most of the history of Australian medicine, your results lived in a lab’s system and your doctor’s inbox. Nowhere you could reach. Getting a copy meant a written request and sometimes a fee. That default has now flipped, and it flipped in your favour.
What it does not do is organise any of it. My Health Record is a repository, and a repository is exactly what it sounds like: things go in.
A year from now you will have far more results in there, newest first, each one its own separate file. Nothing will connect the iron studies from March to the ones from last week. You have to do that yourself.
That gap is the reason exora exists. It reads documents rather than just storing them. The same report becomes a set of facts with dates on them, so a result is a point on a trend instead of a file in a list. Tap any fact and the original page opens at the line it came from.
It is also yours rather than the health system’s. That matters for everything that never reaches My Health Record: the specialist letter, the scan from overseas, the twenty years before you had a record at all.
In practice: you upload what you have, including everything from before My Health Record existed, and it becomes one profile rather than a pile of files. A cholesterol result from 2019 and one from last month end up on the same line, going the same direction, with both original reports one tap away.
You do not need any of that to benefit from this change. Log in, look at what is already sitting there, and download it. That is worth doing this week regardless.
The short version
Since 1 July 2026 pathology and imaging reports go into My Health Record automatically. Reports, not images. Most within 24 hours; anatomical pathology, cytopathology and genetic testing are held for five days so a clinician can reach you first. You can stop a specific result by asking before the test, remove it afterwards, restrict who sees it, or opt out entirely. An abnormal flag is not a diagnosis, and the fastest route to an answer is still the practice’s phone number.
