Here are a few I have come across the last week or so.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and a few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
General Comment
Quite an interesting week with Telstra Health steaming along with the PCEHR remaining in a total funk.
Visiting the NEHTA website news area is interesting at present will all sorts of PR announcements and no real substance coming out. I wonder what there will be in the Budget for NEHTA and the PCEHR. Your guess is as good as mine!
It is good news that the Doctorinspector web site seems to have shut down or been shut down. I wonder which?
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Telstra launches first eHealth product
- David Swan
- April 16, 2015
Telstra has launched MyCareManager, its first eHealth product after months of speculation and millions of dollars in acquisitions.
MyCareManager is an eHealth product developed to improve care to people recently discharged from hospital, bringing in in capabilities from the various companies Telstra has acquired over the past 18 months.
The telco said MyCareManager will allow clients, family members and carers to be more involved in the treatment and monitoring of their illness or injury through an online portal, telemonitoring through wireless health devices and video conferencing.
The solution was developed by community care specialists and Telstra Health subsidiary HealthConnex and includes capabilities from Get Real Health, Entra Health Systems and Pexip.
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Telstra Health unveils telemonitoring service
Product will allow carers to deliver services to patients in remote areas
Telstra Health has launched a telemonitoring service called MyCareManager designed to help disability, community and residential aged care providers deliver services to patients from a distance.
Clients can be monitored through wireless and Bluetooth enabled devices including glucometers, thermometers, blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters and spirometers. Carers can monitor a number of vital signs, get real time information and alerts on any changes or out of range readings and intervene early to reduce the need for hospital admission.
According to Telstra Health managing director Shane Solomon the service can keep people connected through their recovery.
“It means community and residential care providers can reduce travel time and costs, increase productivity and improve the continuity of care. Just as importantly it provides the tools for clients to feel more involved in the delivery of their care and engage with the help they need, when they need it,” he said in a statement.
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Integrated home care solution launched
Telstra health has launched an e-health solution for the aged and community care and disability sectors that includes a self-service portal and telehealth monitoring platform for clients.
MyCareManager features an online portal for workers, clients and families, telemonitoring through wireless health devices or manual input, web-based videoconferencing with any internet-enabled device, and an integration engine that allows information sharing with a service provider’s existing clinical, service and client management systems.
It has been designed for applications such as consumer directed care, chronic disease, medication and wound management and remote medical consultation and aims to increase efficiency, productivity and care collaboration capability for service providers and improve visibility and engagement for clients to help them self-manage their health.
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Still no decision on Royle report
- The Australian
- April 14, 2015
Fran Foo
The Abbott government has yet to decide on the future of its troubled $1 billion Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records system almost 500 days since a review into the PCEHR was conducted.
Doctors were fiercely against adopting the PCEHR for various reasons, including security and privacy concerns, and a poorly structured incentive scheme for clinicians.
On December 20, 2013, then health minister Peter Dutton confirmed receiving the report from the review team, led by UnitingCare Health Group executive director Richard Royle. The review had delved into significant concerns about the progress and implementation of the PCEHR.
The Royle report was said to have provided a “comprehensive plan for the future of electronic health records in Australia”.
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Built on Interoperable Platform, Not Tethered, Empowering Patient With a Single Point of Access to Family Health Records Across Care Settings
SYDNEY, Aust., April 14, 2015 – InterSystems, the global leader in software for connected care, today announced HealthShare Personal Community, a patient engagement solution built on the interoperable InterSystems HealthShare® health informatics platform. InterSystems unveiled Personal Community at the annual HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) conference in Chicago.
Personal Community is a configurable, vendor-neutral patient engagement solution for healthcare providers that gives patients an easy-to-understand, comprehensive view of their health information. It supports services such as appointments, prescription refills, provider-patient dialogue and patient education. Because Personal Community is built on the HealthShare interoperable foundation, it provides patients as well as their authorised representatives a single point of access to electronic medical records in multiple formats and from many care settings – removing the hassle of managing multiple portals and passwords.
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Tumour diagnosis by smartphone
- The Australian
- April 14, 2015
John Ross
US scientists have harnessed the technology used to create holograms in converting smartphones into cancer laboratories.
Boston researchers say their system — the latest attempt to transform mobiles into hi-tech diagnostic tools — can screen tumour samples in 45 minutes, producing results that rival state-of-the-art molecular profiling facilities for $US1.80 ($2.37) a test.
Reporting on their proof-of-concept study this morning in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team says the system could overcome “pathology bottlenecks” in remote areas and developing countries, accelerating recovery rates through rapid diagnosis.
“The platform we have developed provides essential features at an extraordinarily low cost,” said co-author Cesar Castro of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
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Figure 1: 'Instagram for doctors' offers medical 'porn' for the public
Date April 14, 2015 - 8:23PM
Kate Aubusson
A new wave of apps dubbed 'Instagram for doctors' is making it easier for medical professionals to capture and share images of their patients' most fascinating and perplexing ailments with their colleagues.
But as apps such as Figure 1 grow in popularity, unwitting patients risk becoming the freak show of the internet age.
The allure of grotesque medical pictures has piqued the curiosity of the general public. Anyone can freely browse the medical images uploaded by doctors around the world, suggesting the built-in security measures designed to protect patient identity might not go far enough.
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Damning audit for Victorian government ICT spending
35 per cent of projects over budget, nearly half running late
Victoria's auditor-general, John Doyle, has released a damning report on government ICT spending in the state.
Not only are government agencies unable to demonstrate that are realising the expected benefits from IT projects, they are also in general unable to provide in-depth reports on how much IT projects actually cost.
The audit, released today, found that government ICT spending was significantly greater than previous estimates.
The state government spends around $3.02 billion a year on ICT — a 2010 industry report had estimated the government was spending only $1-$1.5 billion per year.
Around 35 per cent of the 1249 projects analysed for the audit went over budget, the report found. Close to a third of those are not completed.
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IT spending by Victorian government agencies slammed as spending balloons to $3 billion
Date April 15, 2015 - 5:06PM
Benjamin Preiss
Victoria's auditor-general has slammed agencies for a lack of accurate information and accountability amid ballooning IT costs.
The cost of information technology has skyrocketed to more than $3 billion a year in Victorian government agencies and entities, a new report has revealed.
Victoria's financial watchdog has lashed out at the lack of accurate information and accountability amid the ballooning costs paid by taxpayers.
On Wednesday, Victorian auditor-general John Doyle reported that between 2011/12 and 2013/14 information and communications technology expenditure had reached an average of $3.02 billion a year. That figure was between two and three times one published estimate in 2010.
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Monash doctors trial transcranial magnetic stimulation on depressed teenagers
Date April 19, 2015 - 12:15AM
Julia Medew
Health Editor
In a world first trial, Melbourne doctors have started beaming magnetic fields into the brains of depressed teenagers in the hope it will treat their illness and improve their cognitive function.
Head of Child Psychiatry at Monash Health, Michael Gordon, said his team was recruiting 40 adolescents with severe depression to see if 20 sessions of magnetic stimulation over four weeks would improve their mental health.
While the technique, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation, has been effective for about 35 per cent of adults whose depression does not respond to other treatments, it has only been tested on 19 adolescents across the globe.
The treatment involves placing a figure eight-shaped coil on the patient's scalp at the front of their head. Over about 25 minutes, it delivers magnetic pulses to the frontal lobe of the brain thought to control depression.
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NEHTA Chair Dr Steve Hambleton on why an eHealth record is important for Australians with asthma
Created on Friday, 17 April 2015
In the Autumn 2015 edition of Asthma Australia's publication, Asthma Update, NEHTA Chair Dr Steve Hambleton explains why if you suffer from asthma an eHealth record is important.
Read the article on Asthma Australia's website or download the article from Asthma Update - Autumn 2015 (1.93 MB)
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Exclusive: Controversial doctor-rating website taken offline
17th Apr 2015
A MYSTERIOUS doctor-rating website that used information from AHPRA’s register of practitioners without permission has disappeared from the web.
As first reported by Medical Observer, the DoctorInspector website billed itself as an “open crowdsource doctor rating website” and created profiles for many Australian health professionals, including GPs, pharmacists and even radiographers.
The profiles included AHPRA numbers and educational histories, as well as a star rating system and reviews.
AHPRA received a number of complaints about the site, which did not accept responsibility for the accuracy of its information and gave those who were rated no means of correcting records, challenging inaccurate reviews, removing their profiles or contacting the site’s owner.
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IBM's Watson Health division will incorporate patient data from Apple
Health care data stored on Watson Health Cloud will be de-identified, said IBM
IBM's Watson supercomputer can be used in many verticals, but healthcare arguably gets the most attention. So much medical data, from patient history to physician notes to medical journals, remains unstructured, making it difficult for machines to interpret it. Watson's capabilities, recently dubbed cognitive computing, can parse data, combine it with treatment guidelines ...
The health information your Apple Watch collects could eventually end up in IBM's Watson cloud computing platform, where medical researchers and doctors can tap it in the course of their work.
On Monday, IBM launched the Watson Health business unit, which will focus on providing the health care community with the analysis tools required to make sense of the many forms of data used in clinical care.
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http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/mobility/67671-apples-researchkit-released-to-medical-researchers
Apple's ResearchKit released to medical researchers
- 15 April 2015
- By Stephen Withers
Apple's ResearchKit framework for collecting medical and health research data via iPhones is now generally available to researchers and developers.
Introduced in March with a small selection of apps from institutions including Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Massachusetts General Hospital, Stanford, and UCLA, the open source ResearchKit is intended to help researchers collect data on a larger scale than has previously been possible.
More than 60,000 iPhone users enrolled in asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson's disease studies during the first few weeks that the initial apps were available.
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Get Real Health and Tribridge Announce New Partnership to Bring Patients a Personalized Care Management Solution
April 14, 2015 8:11am Comments
InstantPHR® Will Be the Patient Engagement Component of Tribridge's New Product, Health360
Rockville, Maryland (PRWEB) April 14, 2015
In an effort to bring more complete, personalized care management solutions to healthcare providers, Get Real Health is partnering with Tribridge to provide a patient engagement platform for the technology services firm's new product, Health360. Get Real Health's flagship product, InstantPHR®, will be the patient engagement component of Health360, a CRM-powered suite of solutions to address care coordination, customer experience, customer engagement, and provider network management. Its comprehensive, scalable care management solution integrates with existing systems to collect, analyze and report on customer intelligence across all channels.
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Lawyers smell blood in electronic medical records
The inherent issues with EMRs - and for the healthcare professionals required to learn them - hasn't been lost on lawyers
As electronic medical records (EMRs) proliferate under federal regulations, kludgey workflow processes and patient data entry quality can be problematic.
The inherent issues with EMRs - and for the healthcare professionals required to learn them - hasn't been lost on lawyers, who see the potential for millions of dollars in judgments for plaintiffs suing for medical negligence.
Keith Klein, a medical doctor and professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, described four such cases where judgments reached more than $7.5 million because the data contained in an EMR couldn't be trusted in court.
Klein, who spoke at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference here today, said he has served as a legal expert in more than 350 medical lawsuits in state and federal courts. And while medical malpractice cases have so far focused on physicians and hospitals, Klein said technology vendors are next on the list.
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Dwarf planet Ceres gets weirder as Dawn sends back new data
Date April 15, 2015 - 9:21AM
It was first classified as a planet, then an asteroid and then a "dwarf planet" with some traits of a moon, but the more scientists learn about Ceres, the stranger it becomes.
And new observations of the sphere of rock and ice circling our sun between Mars and Jupiter have added to the mystery, researchers said on Monday.
Astrophysicists have been looking to a $US473 million ($623 million) mission to test theories that Ceres is a water-rich planetary "embryo" - a relic from the birth of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.
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Earth ate a Mercury-like body early in its history, study finds
Date April 16, 2015 - 10:44AM
Amina Khan
A Mercury-like body smashed into a young Earth and gave our planet's core the radioactive elements necessary to generate a magnetic field, two Oxford geochemists say.
Without that magnetic field, there would be no shield to protect us from the onslaught of radiation constantly bombarding Earth from space, making the existence of life as we know it impossible, scientists say.
The study, published in the journal Nature, offers insight into how Earth's magnetic field, and perhaps its moon, came to be.
Our planet is thought to have formed from small rocky bodies like the ones in the asteroid belt today, study co-author Bernard Wood, a geochemist at the University of Oxford, said in an interview. It's a theory that fits quite well with what's been studied on Earth, though it's not a perfect fit, he said.
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Enjoy!
David.
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