Note: I have excluded (or marked out) any commentary taking significant funding from the Agency or the Department of Health on all this to avoid what amounts to paid propaganda. (e.g. CHF, RACGP, AMA, National Rural Health Alliance etc. where they were simply putting the ADHA line – viz. that the myHR is a wonderfully useful clinical development that will save huge numbers of lives at no risk to anyone – which is plainly untrue) (This signifies probable ADHA Propaganda)
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Note: I have also broadened this section to try to cover all the privacy and security compromising and impacting announcements in the week – along with the myHR. It never seems to stop!
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Do new technologies take ethics out of healthcare?
Hafizah Osman | 15 Mar 2019
The healthcare industry has, for many years, been highly dependent on technology. But with the introduction and use of new technologies such as machine learning and AI in healthcare, the issue of ethics has come into question.
According to a Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care report, ethics is necessary where:
• healthcare services are research oriented, in that clinicians conduct or directly research using data;
• healthcare services that have a wide spread of disciplines facilitate the development of cross-discipline linkages and collaborations;
• high technology research and development activities are located close to major healthcare
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ASD reveals rules for keeping vulnerabilities secret
When Australia's signals intelligence agency finds a cybersecurity vulnerability, it discloses it -- except in a few cases where it might help fulfil a "critical intelligence requirement".
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has quietly published its process for deciding when knowledge of cybersecurity vulnerabilities is kept secret.
This is the first official acknowledgement that the ASD might not disclose all of the vulnerabilities it discovers. However, knowledge of secret vulnerabilities would have always been an essential part the agency's toolkit for offensive cyber operations.
The document Responsible Release Principles for Cyber Security Vulnerabilities was posted on the ASD's website on Friday.
The policy stresses that the agency's starting position for when it finds a weakness is to disclose it and work with vendors to ensure that patches are available before it is made public.
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Yes, break up Google (and Facebook)
- 12:00AM March 16, 2019
This week the ACCC released News Corporation’s submission that Google should be broken up because of its monopoly market power, attracting worldwide attention, not all of it very nice. “Takes one to know one” was a common idea.
But Google should be broken up — Facebook too, although that particular vampire squid was absent from News Corp’s recommendations, and it seemed to be doing its best to break itself up with a catastrophic global “own goal” outage this week.
In its submission, News Corp (publisher of The Weekend Australian) said it “recognises that divestment is a very serious step, and not a foregone conclusion in cases where there is a finding of market power, News Corp Australia considers that divestment is necessary in the case of Google, due to the unparalleled power that it currently exerts over news publishers and advertisers alike”.
Another of the handful of submissions released this week by the ACCC, from a small search engine you may not have heard of called DuckDuckGo, said that Google “occupies more than 90 per cent of the search engine market”, which sounds about right, and definitely qualifies it as a monopoly.
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14 Mar 2019
My Health Record: Ins and outs
By Amy Johnstone
14 Mar 2019
By now, most people will have heard about the government’s My Health Record system. It is the online summary of a person’s health information that can be accessed anywhere and at any time by themselves or their healthcare providers.
The scheme has been operating for the past six years on an opt-in basis. That is, people only had a record if they signed up for one. However, starting this year, the scheme created default accounts for every Australian unless they opted out.
The My Health Record scheme has obvious potential to improve health care outcomes. Working in the medical negligence field, we can immediately think of several cases where medical mishaps and even deaths may have been avoidable if a system like this had been in operation at the time.
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Facebook, Gmail outages give us a warning
- 3:05PM March 14, 2019
Facebook is coming back up after a record outage of up to 11 hours in some areas and many people are wondering how this happened.
Facebook says the outage was not caused by a “DDOS” (distributed denial-of-service) attack, where hackers bombard a service with enough traffic to cause it to fall over.
A software update that went horribly wrong could be a possibility, but given that Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp were all affected, it appears to be related to the networks that distribute Facebook’s traffic around the world.
It would be terribly hard for Facebook to lose your data. Facebook keeps copies of user data at several places around the world so that it can respond to outages, as well as deal with the possibility that its data could be destroyed at any one of these locations by war or natural disaster.
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ACCC will eye algorithms to protect small business: Sims
By Emma Koehn
March 15, 2019 — 12.00am
The consumer watchdog has the capacity to track how algorithms used by big tech companies work and will act to protect the interests of small businesses, its chairman says.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims told The Age and Sydney Morning Herald smaller businesses and startups are not the focus of the watchdog's scrutiny of big data and the use of algorithms.
Instead, the ACCC will work to protect consumers and small business from unfair outcomes and has the ability to test how search and other algorithms operated by larger companies work in practice.
"We have the ability to do that, though we don’t have a lot of capacity. It's not hard to understand these algorithms. You can do it by throwing experiments at them and seeing what they spit out," Sims said on the sidelines of the ACCC Consumer Congress on Thursday.
"We have smart, young people just coming to us from university who can get in the back of these things and understand it.
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RANZCR draft guidelines calls for “correct use” of AI and machine learning
Hafizah Osman | 13 Mar 2019
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists (RANZCR) is on a mission to improve decision-making transparency, data privacy and ethics in the industry’s use of AI and machine learning.
In its draft Ethical Principles for AI in Medicine report, RANZCR calls for the “correct use” of AI and machine learning, specifically with regards to clinical radiology and radiation oncology, and includes the following eight guiding principles:
- Safety: Patient safety and quality of care should be the first and foremost consideration in the development, deployment or utilisation of AI or machine learning, with an evidence base to support it.
· Avoidance of bias: As AI and machine learning systems are limited by their algorithmic design and the data they have access to, they are prone to bias. To minimise bias, RANZCR suggests that the same standard of evidence used for other clinical interventions be applied when regulating machine learning systems and AI tools, with their limitations transparently stated.
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The automation, data linkage and digital governance problems facing government agencies
By Peter Leonard • 15/03/2019
Unaccountable algorithms and out-of-control AI are popular topics of discussion. The more immediate issue, however, is how government agencies will set appropriate boundaries for the sharing and release of the public’s personal data.
Government agencies’ handling of sensitive data is rightly the subject of significant concern, most recently fuelled by the switch to opt-out for My Health Record, initially changing the settings for secondary use of My Health Record data, and by Robodebt automated mail-outs and uses and abuses of Centrelink data. These events raised questions about the conditions under which government data sets should be permitted to be joined at all, rules for controlled data linkage environments (such as government data matching and analytics centres), who makes the decisions about what criteria applies to the kind of data that is released and what algorithms should be deployed into algorithmic decision-making environments.
Legislating the authority to join together the data sets of multiple government agencies overcomes government agencies’ statutory barriers to such sharing. However, it does not address the concerns of citizens and data custodians relating to ‘digital social licence’ and fairness, or the legitimate expectations of affected individuals about automated processes that substantially affect their rights and how government agencies elect to deal with them.
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Home Affairs chief Pezzullo decries rise of the 'digital industrial complex'
By Julian Bajkowski on Mar 14, 2019 8:30PM
Cyber tsar worried about "connectivity without values".
The head of the Department of Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo, has broadsided US platforms like Google, Facebook and other social media providers, likening them to a “digital industrial complex” that subverts democratic institutions and social cohesion.
Addressing the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last night on the “seven gathering storms” surrounding Australia’s national security over the next decade – two of which are information technology centric – Pezzullo said Australians will now likely see “regular attacks on our elections”.
The comments, made on the cusp of state and federal polls, paint a grim picture of “political warfare and subversion, espionage and disinformation” that Pezzullo said were “taking on new forms, especially in this highly connected age”.
The security chief’s speech is significant because it is the first time Pezzullo has publicly articulated his view on the national security environment since securing the passage of highly contentious legislation to control the use of encryption in Australia.
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News Corp calls for break-up of local Google business
- 12 March 2019
- Written by Sam Varghese
Publishing behemoth News Corp Australia has called on the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to consider the break-up of Google's local business, in order to "correct the market structure" as part of solving the issues faced by local publishers in competing in the online space.
In a submission made as a response to the ACCC's preliminary report from its digital platforms inquiry, News Corp, which owns about three-quarters of the print media in Australia, said the competition watchdog should also consider imposing a fee for use of content by either Google or Facebook.
The ACCC had concluded in the preliminary report that Google had substantial market power in online search, search advertising and news referral while Facebook had similar clout in markets for social media, display advertising and online news referral.
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'Unparalleled power': News Corp calls on ACCC to break up Google
By John McDuling and Nick Bonyhady
March 12, 2019 — 12.29pm
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has called on Australia's competition watchdog to break up Google's local operations to limit the search giant's market dominance.
Google's parent company, Alphabet, should be forced to sell or "functionally separate" its search engine from its third-party display advertising business, the Australian publisher argues.
"Google enjoys overwhelming market power in both online search and ad tech services, and ... is abusing its dominant position to the detriment of consumers, advertisers and publishers," News Corp says in its latest submission to the competition regulator's inquiry into digital platforms.
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Privacy obligations under the consumer data right regime: What's changing, and what you'll need to consider
There are three broad actions organisations affected by the Consumer Data Right regime should take to get ready for it.
2018 was a busy time for those responsible for the privacy policies and practices of their organisations. In February 2018 came the introduction of the notifiable data breach scheme and the accompanying need for a data breach response plan. In May 2018 came the need to ensure that any personal information caught by the GDPR was identified and is managed in a way which meets the stricter requirements of that regime. But for those who hoped that now would present an opportunity to bed down those skilfully crafted policies and practices, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Consumer Data Right) Bill 2019 (Cth), recently introduced in the Federal House of Representatives, may not have made for pleasant reading.
Should the CDR regime come to fruition, there will be a complex interplay between an organisation's existing obligations under the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) prescribed by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and a new set of "Privacy Safeguards", which are to be included in the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth). The Privacy Safeguards may be further supplemented by as yet unwritten consumer data rules and standards.
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World Wide Web creator calls for laws for the digital age
By Mike Wright
March 12, 2019 — 8.00am
London: Tim Berners-Lee, who proposed the creation of the World Wide Web 30 years ago, says governments must "translate" laws for the digital age to prevent -malicious behaviour online.
In a speech on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of his proposal, Berners-Lee, 63, will warn that tech giants should not be allowed to "pursue short-term profit" at "the expense of human rights and public safety".
He will tell an audience at London's Science Museum that as well as making our daily lives easier, his invention has provided opportunities for scams and "those who spread hatred".
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Economic benefits predicted as Brisbane gets world-class Data61 robotics centre
Updated Mar 12, 2019 — 8.18am, first published at 12.01am
CSIRO's Data61 division will open a new facility to conduct world-leading research into robotics and autonomous systems in Brisbane, in a move it says will position Australia to take a lead in a fast-growing industry that will be worth $23 billion globally by 2025.
Chief executive Adrian Turner said Brisbane had been chosen for the facility, which has cost over $3 million to establish, because of a high concentration of robotics research expertise compared to other Australian capitals, and a greater prevalence of robotics start-ups.
The 600-square-metre facility will be used to further pursue research that is already under way within Data61 to develop autonomous robotics systems to interact safely and seamlessly with humans in various situations.
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Overview of our CESPHN Programs
Person Centred Medical Neighbourhood Program (PCMNP)
PCMN Program is an opportunity for practices to adopt a more innovative model of care delivery by focussing on the needs of the patient first and using teams, practice data and effective communication to improve service delivery. This is known as a 'person centred care' model. Person centred care is about delivering the right service to the right person in the right place at the right time. It is about proactive care - not reactive care. Person centred care often involves practice transformation, but we believe that this model of care can help our health system cope with increasing demands and decreasing relative resources.
The PCMN Program will support participating practices to modify and adapt their patient care and business systems.
The Program offers:
Ongoing support of a Quality Improvement Program Officer
- Face to face training
- Workshops
- Clinical leadership training
- Assessment of the readiness of your practice
- Quality improvement resources and tools from CESPHN
- Upskilling in:
- the new funding models
- becoming champions of change and implementing CQI within your practice
- managing and improving the way you manage your population health for your practice.
We also believe that the PCMN model of care is facilitated through our other programs in the way we support primary care into the future.
Note: The is the Central and Eastern Sydney PHN
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National Library launches 'enormous' archive of Australia's Internet
The Australian Web Archive, which launched this month, is one of the biggest in the world
George Nott (Computerworld)11 March, 2019 09:23
“The Australian Web Archive [AWA] is one of the biggest in the world. And when we say big, we mean enormous,” says director general of the National Library of Australia, Dr Marie-Louise Ayres.
The new archive, which launched last week, contains around 600 terabytes of data across 9 billion records. In bookshelf terms; if the records were printed and stacked they would stretch from Canberra to Cairns.
The archive contains thousands of .au domain web pages – some still popular and others defunct – allowing users to see how they looked at different points in time from 1996 to the present.
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Putin v the people: giants should keep faith
The Economist
- 12:00AM March 11, 2019
Sometimes it seems as if Vladimir Putin’s presidency has been made for television. His bare-chested exploits on horseback, microlight flights with cranes and the fighting in Ukraine and Syria were planned with cameras in mind.
Having helped turn a little-known KGB officer into a patriotic icon, TV has sustained him in power. But there are signs the spell of the gogglebox is weakening, as ever more Russians look to the internet for news and state-controlled broadcast channels compete with social media stars, YouTubers and online activists.
Over a decade, trust in television has fallen from 80 per cent to less than half. Among 18-44-year-olds, 82 per cent use YouTube and news is its fourth most-watched category. Some vloggers have audiences that dwarf those of the nightly newscasts. Putin’s government is attempting to gain control over social media through legislation, intimidation and new surveillance infrastructure.
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Here's the best way for GPs to beat fake news
An experiment on Twitter proves that more information is better when it comes to changing minds, say researchers
Antony Scholefield
11th March 2019
In a world of fake news, an issue doctors regularly confront is how to best correct misinformation on social media.
Writing in the British Journal of Psychology, Australian researchers say more information is better when it comes to changing minds.
They wanted to test if refuting claims under Twitter’s character limit (now 280, but 140 when the experiment was conducted) was effective.
To test this, experiment participants were shown a tweet saying, ‘It’s not true that the murder rate in Boston was at a 15-year high in 2016’.
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Fed chairman Jerome Powell just revealed what he fears most
Mar 11, 2019 — 10.47am
Washington | US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has revealed that his greatest concern, 10 years on from the global financial meltdown, is the risk of a cyber attack taking down the world banking system.
In a unusual pre-recorded interview with prime-time CBS's 60 Minutes program, Mr Powell also suggested that America's opioid crisis is wiping out a generation of younger workers and artificially suppressing the country's labour force participation rate compared with other advanced economies.
While he reiterated the Fed current stance that it will be "patient" on its next official interest rate move, Mr Powell revealed that even though the central bank, which is also America's chief financial regulator, devotes a lot of time and resources to protect financial markets, it may not be enough.
"For cyber risk, I've never felt a time when I think 'we're doing enough'," he said in the interview, which was broadcast late on Sunday [Monday AEDT]. "For the risks that we face, that certainly is the largest one."
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Comparison of e-health records: Australia versus the US
Authored by
Heather Deixler
Bianca Phillips
Bianca Phillips
This is the fifth article in a series on the digital health revolution.
AS debate continues over the implementation of the My Health Record for Australian patients, perhaps it would be instructive to compare it with the United States’ system. We provide an overview of the US federal laws that govern the privacy and security of electronic health records, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and draws on some comparisons with the Australian My Health Record system.
HIPAA was enacted by the US Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Over a decade later, it was amended by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) which was enacted in 2009.
A number of regulations were promulgated thereunder including:
- the Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information (HIPAA Privacy Rule);
- the Security Standards for the Protection of Electronic Protected Health Information (HIPAA Security Rule); and
- the Notification in the Case of Breach of Unsecured Protected Health Information (HIPAA Breach Notification Rule) — collectively, HIPAA.
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Comments welcome!
David.
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