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! Sadly social media platforms also get a large run most weeks. There are a lot of actors out there trying all sorts of things on!
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AFP wants a system to collect social and political info to aid police operations
Opens expression of interest for the two-year project.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) wants a better view into social, technological, political, and policy changes from around the nation and abroad, seeking a solution to compile this information.
Publishing a request for expressions of interest (EOI) for the provision of an Open Source Information Collection Solution, the AFP expects the solution to provide daily reporting.
The AFP said the EOI responses will be used to shortlist for a Request for Tender (RFT) to establish a services agreement for the "provision of publically available and open source information".
As the EOI explains, vendors shortlisted will have the opportunity to tender for the provision of open source information, which includes listening, collecting, and reporting of information on events that could impact on AFP Protection Operations.
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How the ACCC wants to protect your privacy from big tech
Jul 26, 2019 — 4.56pm
While six of the
23 recommendations of the landmark review into digital platforms are about protecting consumers, advocates have already warned the measures might fall short.
The consumer-focused recommendations in the ACCC report roughly fall under four categories.
First, proposed enhancements to the Privacy Act would impose higher standards for issuing notifications and obtaining user consent for the collection, use, or disclosure of user information.
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Digital platform concerns need global response
Google and Facebook have business models that have flummoxed competition regulators and governments seeking tax reform.
Jul 27, 2019 — 12.00am
There are parallels between the competition regulator’s deep dive into the powerful and globally dominant business models of Google and Facebook and the work being done by the G20 to stop tax avoidance by global multinationals.
At the core of both investigations is the willingness of billions of people to take advantage of “free” services in return for supplying valuable personal information about themselves and their online activities.
This bartering of services has stumped competition regulators who have not had the power to intervene when the computer algorithms which make Google and Facebook so efficient are used to maximise their own commercial interests to the detriment of competition.
Bartering is even more problematic for governments trying to collect taxes because it is almost impossible to determine when the right to tax arises and where the income is payable. Google and Facebook pay relatively little tax in Australia compared to their revenue.
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Apple Watch must not become Big Brother
The boundary between personal data monitoring and mass surveillance has to be protected.
John Gapper
Jul 25, 2019 — 12.27pm
When I went swimming in my local pool this week,
my Apple Watch tracked not only my time on each lap, but also my heart rate throughout. Then I rode a Lime e-bike home, which noted my exact route, time and calories burnt - “GPS Tracked”, it declared proudly.
Apple was not the first to imagine heart sensors.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the “telescreens” in the homes of party members recorded heartbeats that might reveal a plot against Big Brother. “You could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.”
Swimming times are mundane data but shouldn't be used to sell products. Fairfax Media
Apple Watch does not feel Orwellian but many cases of data surveillance do. Equifax, the credit scoring agency, this week agreed to pay almost $US800 million ($1.1 billion) to settle with US regulators over a 2017 hack in which the sensitive personal information of 147 million customers was stolen from a database.
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ACCC Digital Platforms report calls for sweeping reforms
Google and Facebook's dominance drives call for new regulation of privacy, competition, content and more.
The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission’s Digital Platforms Inquiry has delivered its long-awaited final report, and it recommends a raft of far-reaching regulatory changes to curb the powers of web giants in Australia, and make them more responsible for content they distribute.
The
600-page report focuses on the market power amassed by Google and Facebook and finds they’ve together accumulated so much of it that they distort markets and do harm to consumers and industry (especially advertisers and publishers).
The report also calls for reform of Australia’s privacy laws, to inform citizens about how digital platforms use their data and offer incentives to tend it well.
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Tech giants in reform firing line
The Morrison government will consider regulating the market power of multinational digital platforms — including Google, Facebook and Amazon — with a 600-page report into the behaviour of the tech giants to be handed down today by the consumer watchdog.
The Australian understands the government will not finalise its response to the unprecedented investigation by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission until the end of the year after setting up an advisory unit to be led by Treasury.
The Communications Minister will also be part of a process that could ultimately lead to significant reforms to the practices of the tech companies, including new regulations to cover breaches of consumer and competition law, private consumer data collection and copyright theft from major media.
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ACCC digital platforms inquiry breaks new ground
Future policy around tech giants must be 'sensible and desirable'
ACCC chief Rod Sims sees his digital platforms inquiry as the first real holistic look at the impact of the digital platforms from a consumer and competition perspective. The recommendations back his claim.
Europe and the US have looked at the issue from privacy or other perspectives, without trying to tie the issues into one bundle.’
The final report thankfully rejects the notion of a new digital regulator. Instead, there will be a new division of the ACCC looking at platforms, from an enforcement angle, with regard to consumer and competition breaches.
This division will run its own experiments, evaluating the platforms’ algorithms and continually testing Google and Facebook on what they are doing any why.
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Citing Australia, US Attorney General demands backdoors
'It can and must be done' says William Barr.
US attorney general William P. Barr has cited Australia’s efforts to compel access to encrypted communications as justification for his own nation to legislate for the same outcome.
Speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security, Barr said “We believe that when technology providers deploy encryption in their products, services, and platforms they need to maintain an appropriate mechanism for lawful access".
“This means a way for government entities, when they have appropriate legal authority, to access data securely, promptly, and in an intelligible format, whether it is stored on a device or in transmission.”
Barr cited Australia, where the Assistance and Access Bill compels technology companies to facilitate access to encrypted material, as proof the US needs similar capabilities.
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Facebook fined record $7bn for privacy failures
- By John D. Mckinnon
- The Wall Street Journal
- 12:00AM July 25, 2019
Facebook has agreed to pay a record $US5 billion ($7.16bn) fine and better police its data-privacy practices to settle a long-running federal investigation that has damaged the company’s standing with consumers and clouded its future.
Under the settlement, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be required to certify that the company is in compliance with new privacy strictures, and could be subject to civil and criminal penalties for false certifications.
“The $US5 billion penalty against Facebook is the largest ever imposed on any company for violating consumers’ privacy and almost 20 times greater than the largest privacy or data security penalty ever imposed worldwide,” the Federal Trade Commission said. “It is one of the largest penalties ever assessed by the US government for any violation.”
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Thursday, 25 July 2019 02:47
Trust important as foundation for AI-based decision-making: report
The necessity of trust to achieve long-term business success — especially as a foundation for decision-making based on artificial intelligence — has been highlighted in a new study that found three in five business leaders (63%) in nine countries, including Australia, say they would trust decisions made by AI if substantial reasoning for reaching those decisions is available.
The global study —
Fujitsu Future Insights Global Digital Transformation Report 2019 — released on Wednesday by Fujitsu, found that organisations were more likely to succeed in digital transformation when their approach included measures to drive trust, such as long-term perspectives, empathic leadership and measures to empower employees.
And in addition, two thirds (66%) of study respondents were inclined to trust organisations that published a code of ethics governing their use of AI.
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What Google, Facebook could face in U.S. antitrust probe
Google, Facebook and Amazon are among those expected to face scrutiny
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether big technology companies are engaged in anticompetitive behaviour, addressing a rising tide of criticism they have become too powerful to the detriment of consumers.
The Justice Department has said it will investigate "whether and how" online platforms in "search, social media, and some retail services online" are engaging in behaviour that stifles competition and harms consumers.
While the Justice Department did not name any targets in announcing the probe on Tuesday, sources have indicated Alphabet's Google, social media giant Facebook, online retailer Amazon.com and possibly Apple will likely be reviewed.
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Equifax’s billion-dollar data breach disaster: Will it change executive attitudes toward security?
Equifax has been fined over US$1 billion for its 2017 breach and is expected to spend over $2 billion in mandated and voluntary security improvements. All organisations that profit off consumer data should take notice
Equifax announced on Monday that it has agreed to a record-breaking settlement related to its massive 2017 data breach, which exposed the personal and financial records of more than 148 million people.
The settlement requires the beleaguered credit ratings agency to spend at least US$1.38 billion to resolve consumer claims against it. It creates a non-reversionary fund of $380.5 million to pay benefits to the class of consumers harmed by the breach, including cash compensation, credit monitoring, and help with identity restoration.
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Machine learning can find you in heavily sampled, anonymised dataset
An 'anonymised' dataset is anything but, researchers demonstrate
A sample set of anonymised data can be reverse engineered using machine learning techniques to re-identify individuals, a paper by researchers from Imperial College London and the UCLouvain in Belgium has demonstrated.
Stripping a dataset's records of direct identifiers like name and email address, and sharing only a small proportion of them, has been the main method of sharing data while preserving people’s privacy.
The intuition is that there may be multiple people who are, say, in their 30s, female, and living in Brisbane. Any record matching those demographics in a sample of anonymised data could conceivably belong to any number of individuals.
“The issue? It does not work,” the researchers said.
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Easily re-identified 'anonymised' data threatens privacy
Gaussian copula could trip GDPR trap.
Researchers have once again shown that sensitive data, supposedly anonymised so as not to reveal its subjects, can be re-constituted with relative ease.
Data scientists from London's Imperial College and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium had a crack at estimating the likelihood of a specific person being correctly re-identified in even heavily incomplete, anonymised datasets.
Their Gaussian copula-based method turned out to be very accurate.
"Using our model, we find that 99.98 percent of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes.
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Australian Medical Association assesses My Health Record's success so far
Nathan Eddy | 26 Jul 2019
The Australian Medical Association federal president Dr. Tony Bartone touted the success of the country’s electronic health record platform, My Health Record, during a speech for the National Press Club on Wednesday, but stressed the need for more patient data in those records.
While Dr. Bartone noted that almost all (90%) of Australians have an account, the number of participants is equaled in importance by the information contained in those records.
"At the moment, there's just not the information being shared between all parts of the system in a meaningful manner to allow utility (between doctors),"
he said during a Q&A session at the National Press Club.
In an email interview with Healthcare IT News, AMA South Australia president Dr. Chris Moy explained the two biggest challenges so far in rolling out the platform have been related.
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AMA says almost all Australians have a My Health Record but not everyone is using it
The AMA's federal president has said the number of records doesn't mean anything if there's nothing in it.
Despite the number of Australians that have a My Health Record, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) federal president Dr Tony Bartone has highlighted that it will not deliver all that it's touted as promising if it isn't being utilised properly.
"So almost a year on from that debate we've seen the introduction, and the legislation has passed, and certainly 90.7% of Australians now do have a My Health record," Bartone said, addressing the National Press Club on Wednesday.
"But that's only part of the conversation, because that record doesn't mean anything if there's nothing in it."
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TGA Weighs In On Cyber Security Expectations For Medical Devices
The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (the TGA) has finally published long-awaited cyber security guidance targeted specifically at:
- manufacturers developing software for use in medical devices, including artificial intelligence;
- manufacturers of medical devices which include components susceptible to cyber-based threats; and
- medical device sponsors in Australia.
Further information, including the guidance documents themselves, can be found
here.
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Enabling health care with artificial intelligence
By Dhannu Daniel*
Tuesday, 16 July, 2019
Artificial intelligence (AI) is augmenting human capabilities and enabling people and machines to work collaboratively, thereby changing the very nature of healthcare work.
A healthcare executive survey showed that an impressive 72% of Australian healthcare leaders are either piloting or planning AI adoption.1 Furthermore, 93% of health executives have AI projects on their agenda, with just 7% saying they are minimally or not at all focused on AI.
With the strong focus on implementing AI, Accenture has identified four areas that healthcare organisations need to focus on to generate a strong return on investment (ROI) and ensure AI and humans work effectively together.
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'Anonymised' data can still be used to identify you, scientists show
By Gina Kolata
July 24, 2019 — 11.26am
Your medical records might be used for scientific research. But don't worry, you're told; personally identifying data was removed.
Information about you gathered by a government bureau might be made public. But don't worry; it, too, has been "anonymised."
This week, scientists showed that all this information may not be as anonymous as promised. The investigators developed a method to re-identify individuals from just bits of what were supposed to be anonymous data.
Data can be anonymised in various ways, but keeping it useful often means leaving it open to reconstruction.
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Managing reputation and online reviews in an era of fake news, keyboard warriors and troll farms
Consumer reviews are big business. We are operating in a world where a lone keyboard warrior can reach a global audience, warehouses of people (usually in other countries) known as ‘troll farms’ can mass generate fake content, and consumer activism is on the increase.
The growth potential of online forums as a means for your business to engage with, and market to, consumers is exponential. A key focus is how to implement and continually evaluate strategies to take advantage of these opportunities. In doing so, you should be attune to the legal and reputational issues which can arise and the ways in which your business and brand can be susceptible to damage and disruption.
Knowledge is power
You can’t protect your reputation if you don’t have eyes on what is being posted about you. When you are already grappling with increasing legal, regulatory and compliance obligations it is difficult to commit time and resources to overseeing publications. You need systems and processes to identify content and reviews.
Consider using an online reputation monitoring tool, which is a type of software, sometimes freely available, which assists you to identify reviews and provide reports on feedback trends. At the very least have Google Alerts set up for your organisation.
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Are GPs ready to let go of the fax?
Zilla is a Sydney-based freelance journalist covering business, finance and practice management topics.
23rd July 2019
Rumours of the death of the fax machine, it seems, are greatly exaggerated.
It’s been almost three years since the RACGP identified what it said was a new national priority to save patients’ lives by eliminating faxes and letters as the chosen means for doctors to communicate with each other about patient care.
The safety stakes can be high. In 2015, a patient with Hodgkin lymphoma, Mettaloka Halwala, was found dead in a hotel room near Shepparton, Victoria, where he was staying while undergoing chemotherapy at Goulburn Valley Hospital.
A PET scan had revealed severe, rapid-onset bleomycin toxicity affecting both lungs, but Mr Halwala’s haematologist, Dr Robin Filshie, did not receive these results until five days later.
NB: Seeing the fax as the whole problem for this case I believe is patently absurd.
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Australians lost $16m to ID theft so far this year
Prompts fresh warning to report incidents.
Australians have already lost $16 million to Identity theft and phishing-related scams this year, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
The ACCC's deputy chair Delia Rickard urged Australians that had lost money to scammers to report it.
“If you think scammers might have gained access to your personal information, even in a scam completely unrelated to your finances, immediately contact your bank,” Rickard said.
Four in 10 reports to Scamwatch so far this year have involved either attempts to gain information or the actual loss of information, largely through digital channels or phone scams.
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Smart Energy Council calls for state to abandon facial recognition
July 22, 2019 — 11.44am
Australia's Smart Energy Council is calling on the Victorian government to immediately scrap the need for facial recognition to claim the solar rebate, amid a backlash from customers and installers struggling with the new technology.
The government should "immediately scrap" the use of facial recognition, with its failure stalling installations across the state and leaving elderly customers in tears, says John Grimes, chief executive of the Smart Energy Council.
"This application has made the process of installing solar even harder. The industry is really struggling after being choked by Solar Homes Victoria, and this application is not helping, it's making things worse," Grimes says.
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Half of medical errors preventable: study
It's possible many errors in primary care haven't been picked up, say researchers
22nd July 2019
More than half of healthcare incidents resulting in patient harm are preventable, say UK researchers, who are calling for more research into diagnostic errors in primary care.
The review and meta-analysis of data from more than 337,000 patients across 70 studies by University of Manchester-led researchers identified more than 47,000 harmful incidents, of which nearly 26,000 were preventable.
In the results, published in the BMJ, they said the pooled prevalence of preventable harm was one in 20 patients, half the total proportion of harmful events.
Twelve per cent of incidents led to serious harm or death.
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Security of patient data needs to be prioritised
As mobility continues to transform the way we live and work, cybersecurity and privacy concerns are top of mind for many individuals and businesses.
The healthcare industry is increasingly adopting mobile technology and becoming more reliant on the transmission of data, including confidential patient data on mobile devices. This shift has led to concerns around data security risks in health care, and the implications this may have on the privacy and safety of patient health information.
While recently the most intense scrutiny has been directed at the Australian Government’s
My Health Record, both healthcare providers and services generating patient health data should ensure this information is kept secure.
Healthcare sector under scrutiny
Data security in health care has been a contentious topic since the government extended the deadline to opt out of My Health Record to 31 January 2019. My Health Record is an online summary of an individual’s health information, which can be viewed by both patients and healthcare providers. However, following public pressure regarding the security of this information, several amendments have been made.
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Time may be nigh for some medical software vendors
July 19, 2019 Jeremy Knibbs
Migration from not so interoperable and older closed architectures to ones which are more flexible, open, web based and interoperable, may no longer be a matter of waiting things out to see how the market pans out. If some vendors don’t start evolving their products in earnest now, they may not make it to the other side.
At last month’s Wild Health Summit in Sydney there were some subtle but very clear warnings in play for some of the country’s major healthcare software vendors, indeed, even some for some of the major global vendors. The people who pay for healthcare, mainly the government, but in the end, patients as well, aren’t going to tolerate specifying or using systems which do not have future proofed open systems architectures built in.
Until now, Healthcare has stubbornly resisted the ‘open economy’ technologies that have driven transformation in other markets. And many have expressed a view that healthcare is different and won’t transform like other markets because it is too complex, regulated, risky and culturally awkward (the cult of the doctor). But the new open economy is cheaper, safer, more efficient and much more patient friendly. Procurement by big government departments is now driving change to open technologies which offer safer and more efficient patient outcomes.
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eHealth standards and governance might not be the issue people think
July 19, 2019 Jeremy Knibbs
Angst over the need for Australia to develop and introduce suitable governance and standards for the delivery of ehealth products and data sharing might be misplaced. The market, led by powerful government procurement and commissioning trends, might be informally getting the job done anyway.
Last month’s Wild Health summit in Sydney put some serious stakeholders onto a panel to debate the need for Australia to get it’s act together on developing an appropriate governance and standards regime for healthcare data sharing and product development. We had a bad regime some years back but it disintegrated until we didn’t even have on, and now, while there are standards swirling around, key among them HL-7 and FHIR, nothing is formally being pushed or backed by the government at this stage.
The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) is hard at work looking at the issue and is due to release some early findings of commissioned work done by #wearehealthinformatics managing director David Rowlands.
The ADHA’s COO, Betting McMahon, told Wild Health attendees that the topic of standards and governance was a complex milieu involving many stakeholders at various stages of commercial stress. She said that things being so complex dictated that time was needed so that stakeholders had an ability to adapt within their various current constraints.
She also said it was the Agency’s role at this stage to identify the issues, and make them known to all stakeholders, so that the process of moving to a universal standards and governance regime in Australia was productive, not damaging.
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Artificial intelligence could boost success of clinical trials
Artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially boost the success rate of clinical trials, according to a review by researchers from IBM Research-Australia and MIT published in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences. Big Pharma and other drug developers are grappling with a dilemma: the era of blockbuster drugs is coming to an end. At the same time, adding new drugs to their portfolios is slow and expensive. It takes on average 10–15 years and $1.5–2 billion to get a new drug to market; approximately half of this time and investment is devoted to clinical trials. Although AI has not yet had a significant impact on clinical trials, AI-based models are helping trial design, AI-based techniques are being used for patient recruitment, and AI-based monitoring systems aim to boost study adherence and decrease dropout rates. The researchers found that AI can potentially boost the success rate of clinical trials by efficiently measuring biomarkers that reflect the effectiveness of the drug being tested; identifying and characterising patient subpopulations best suited for specific drugs. Less than a third of all phase 2 compounds advance to phase 3, and one in three phase 3 trials fail, not because the drug is ineffective or dangerous, but because the trial lacks enough patients or the right kind of patients. Start-ups, large corporations, regulatory bodies, and governments are all exploring and driving the use of AI for improving clinical trial design. The authors also identify several areas showing the most real-world promise of AI for patients: AI-enabled systems may allow patients more access to and control over their personal data; coaching via AI-based apps could occur before and during trials; AI could monitor individual patients’ adherence to protocols continuously in real time; AI techniques could help guide patients to trials of which they may not have been aware; the use of AI in precision medicine approaches, such as applying technology to advance how efficiently and accurately professionals can diagnose, treat and manage neurological diseases, is promising.
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Comments more than welcome!
David.