Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

It Is So Good The ADHA Is Spreading Its Wings Overseas!

Here is the blurb.

The Australian Digital Health Agency comes to DC 

"The Australian Digital Health Agency comes to DC! We were proud to support the The 8th Annual Health Datapalooza at our Embassy last week. CEO of the Australian Digital Health Agency Tim Kelsey shared digital health insights and opportunities for innovation in Australia with a captivated audience. The event provided an opportunity for Australian health tech companies to connect with leading US tech organisations."

You can see the great spread we put on in Washington from this link:


We certainly put on a good little reception!  Now at least we know what the ADHA is up to. Note the typos in the actual web site with "We are proud to" repeated in title.

Comments welcome!

David.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi David
Perhaps you could give a prize for identifying the individuals...'captivated' IT executives are getting younger and younger!

Anonymous said...

"CEO of the Australian Digital Health Agency Tim Kelsey shared digital health insights and opportunities for innovation in Australia"

That wouldn't have taken long.

Anonymous said...

All for international relations, they state - provided an opportunity for Australian health tech companies to connect with leading US tech organisations

Who did we fly over there? At what cost? And what return to the tax payer was the result in terms of jobs and money?

As Tim was simply facilitating much of his time, and has a long history of being at the event what was the Business case?

Surely this is the role of the trade Minister

Still Australia will be remembered as 'you know Bobby, what was it that NHS guy was telling us?

Anonymous said...

Please add alike button for comments because 9.29 deserves one; thank you in advance David

Anonymous said...

2nd photo 5th from left Miss Markham out from under the staircase behind the dining room.

Anonymous said...

According to the ADHAlatest blog Innovation is a Team sport, I would argue in the world of innovation now we have the MyHR as the constraining factor the ADHA is more a kin to a teen spot on the face of innovation. I see nothing from the Agency that would resemble nanos gigantum humeris insident.

Anonymous said...

What an appalling waste of money on self-aggrandizement. Quite disgraceful.

Anonymous said...

Here's Tim's insightful, helpful, presentation.... http://www.ehcca.com/presentations/HDP2/kelsey_cs3_2.pdf

Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

Gee, talk about simplistic.

I assume that if it had actually been used by anyone for anything useful, he would have mentioned it. After all it does exist for a purpose doesn't it?

The whole thing is about technology. There's nothing about how the data it to be used, other than "My Health Record makes consumers' health information more accessible to providers and convenient, safe and secure for consumers."

Was this used at Health Datapalooza? If so they must have been really puzzled. The question "Is that it?" spring to mind.

Anonymous said...

Yes, it is the powerpoint delivered to the no doubt gobsmacked audience... Here's the agenda

http://www.academyhealth.org/node/10446

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Bernard Robertson-Dunn said...

According to the conference brochure,
http://www.academyhealth.org/files/2017_Health_Datapalooza_Brochure_0.pdf
about half the attendees in 2016 were from government or Health IT.

The rest were a mixture, some of whom may be actual practitioners.

From what I read in medical oriented publications is that the future of healthcare lies in patent-centric and/or personalised/personalized medicine.

The agenda does include references to the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, but they are a research funding organisation. But apart from that there's little or nothing about real health care innovation, other than more of the same old mantras

- Health IT is good, let's do more Health IT.
- Health data is good, we need more of it
- Health data is good, let's make it more accessible.

They (and ADHA) could all do a lot worse than read Dr Enrico Coiera's paper "Why e-health is so hard" in The Medical journal of Australia 198(4):178-9 · March 2013

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235773102_Why_e-health_is_so_hard

A couple of quotes:
"E-health is hard because it is a complex intervention in a complex system. Indeed, e-health projects are probably among the most complex interventions we can undertake, especially at a national scale. The rules for designing e-health at the level of clinical practice are not the same as those at large scale, and the gap is as wide as that between in-vitro and in-vivo clinical studies. This explains why
success at individual sites is no guarantee of success elsewhere."

and

"This is the context within which we must understand ehealth:
trying to re-engineer a system that was never consciously engineered in the first place, with a knowledge base that is sometimes loose praxis at best and not yet fully a science. More profoundly, while the cries to re-engineer the health “system” are near universal, we do not even know what kind of a system it is. Are we dealing with a linear or a complex adaptive ecosystem? Does it exhibit chaos or inertia? Where are its boundaries and control points? How can we re-engineer our health system when there is no discipline of health systems engineering, no health systems science? How can we change the 'system' when people use the term so loosely, no one ever asking what the other means? Yet use it we do; re-engineer it we try; and nowhere is mostly where we get."

My Masters and PhD were in Control Engineering so I know that Enrico's comments about re-engineering systems as complex as health care are spot on.

Were any of these things mentioned at Datapalooza? Not that I could find.

Will the ADHA strategy deal with any of this? We'll have to wait and see.

Anonymous said...

How can we re-engineer our health system when there is no discipline of health systems engineering, no health systems science

To start this takes time and experience from dedicated people grounded in specific knowledges bases and disciplines.

That said why is it that all the people who started this journey and have the credentials have been pushed out of the place they all belong?

I hear very concerning issues from the ADHA. A peice of advice, if you cannot crasp what they are talking about because you don't have the same level of insight, don't sack them and excile them, move somewhere else yourself Tim and co

Anonymous said...

7:38 PM your concerns are valid, what is being discovered is when axing or. Alueable people occurred Tim is never around. We have an emerging culture of hiding from uncomfortable situations. Don't be expecting anything other than staged addresses where questions are filtered and egos are protected.

Some Leader we have overseeing digital health.

tygrus said...

If I think about banking, the complexity is of the order of 10x10x10.
If I think about Health, the complexity is like 20'000 x 15'000 x 100.
Over 1'000 body parts, 20'000 diseases, 100's of types of doctors/specialist/surgeons/AHP/clinical occupations, over 6'000 health interventions, 1'900 generic compounds/device, over 17'000 items in the chemist list, millions of drug interactions, many different care settings and patient variations.

While the banking transactions are more similar they occur 100's per person per year so the cost of handling each transaction type is cheaply shared. In health, there are some more frequent diseases/actions/events, there are many others that rarely occur per 10Million people per year. The cost of describing every use health care case is mind boggling but each profession can review their own area of expertise. HL7, FHIR, SNOMED-CT, OpenEHR et. al. have made some progress towards interoperability but so much more is yet to be done. EHR's are not following the same standards. SNOMED-CT doesn't cover everything that GP's and AHP's use. There are still a lot of profession specific term/classification/code sets which are not integrated with SNOMED-CT and cross mapping can fail.

Mistakes and testing in other non-health industries need not cost lives. Mistakes and testing in health care often has the potential to threaten life.

Tell them "they're dreaming" if a developer or government employee says, "applying Information Technology and automation from other industries to Health Care should be easy" (ie. they think the only problem is luddites and maybe needs financial incentives). Yes, applying Information Technology and automation to Health Care is possible but what is delivered is often far from ideal with more negatives than positives.

We keep pointing at the poor foundations but like the leaning tower of Pisa, they just want to adjust the building design and keep building wonky towers. They appear to be doing a lot of work and progress but what benefits will be realised in 5 to 10 years when they find these towers falling over and deserted. Again they focus on this dream of a Digital Health revolution but refuse to listen to reality.