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This weekly blog is to explore the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy and related matters.
I will also try to highlight ADHA Propaganda when I come upon it.
Just so we keep count, the latest Notes from the ADHA Board are dated 6 December, 2018! Secrecy unconstrained! This is really the behavior of a federal public agency gone rogue – and it just goes on! When you read this is will be 9 months + of radio silence. I wonder how far the ANAO report is away?
Note: Appearance here is not to suggest I see any credibility or value in what follows. I will leave it to the reader to decide what is worthwhile and what is not! The point is to let people know what is being said / published that I have come upon.
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For GP care, the NBN is just a New Bloody Nuisance
22nd October 2019
Don’t we all love challenges? But maybe not this one.
The phone was dead.
It is Monday morning, 9am and no one can get through.
That’s because communication is now routed through the unreliable NBN. This seems to happen with an annoying frequency on a day or two every few months.
The last time it occurred, a patient visiting from overseas, unable to contact the surgery by telephone, presented to the door, remarking that the system here was worse than what he experienced living in a developing country.
Not that I didn’t have problems with landlines in the past. Sometimes calls were unintelligible because of crackling lines. I learned there were exchanges, boxes where wires co-mingled in nefarious ways to cause havoc.
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5 tips to protect your pharmacy ahead of Microsoft changes
Free Windows 7 upgrades are set to end
22nd October 2019
Community pharmacies are being warned to upgrade older computer systems before January to avoid being targeted by hackers.
Pharmacy organisations have begun issuing warnings to pharmacies ahead of 14 January 2020, when Microsoft will end free security updates for the Windows 7 operating system.
After this date, systems still using Windows 7 will be more vulnerable to attacks by hackers, viruses and malware.
“It’s very important for increasingly IT-enabled pharmacies to ensure their systems are both up-to-date and secure,” says a Pharmacy Guild spokesperson.
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Why health apps are great for patients, not for GPs
23rd October 2019
An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Whoever invented that phrase probably wasn’t talking about the iPhone manufacturer.
Yet every year, it seems Apple (the company) is becoming more medically inclined.
Last year it unveiled an automatic ECG reader for the Apple Watch 4, which alerts wearers to potential atrial fibrillation — although it’s still not available in Australia because the company hasn’t applied for TGA registration.
Now it has announced a plethora of health-related updates to both the iPhone and the Apple Watch.
These include a menstrual cycle tracker, available in all countries, that tells wearers when to expect their next period based on previous data.
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SaaS isn't suitable for GPs - but there is a solution
Dr Saricilar is a doctor at Liverpool Hospital, a Master of Surgery student at the University of Sydney and a conjoint associate lecturer at UNSW. He has a keen interest in open-source software.
24th October 2019
Over the past decade, there has been a major shift in the nature of software. Such a shift that would leave the founders of the modern computer rolling in their graves.
The simplicity and efficiency of tools is gone, replaced by bloated and monolithic software that does everything you need and a lot of what you don’t need. While it may seem like a blessing to many, it comes at a price.
And that price is charged at a weekly or monthly basis to your credit card.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming the industry norm. Now, rather than buying a bit of software, you effectively pay for the service that the company provides.
An example is Netflix, where you are paying for a service that allows you to stream movies and shows, but you never get to own the videos you watch.
Or to explain more simply, let’s take the example of renovating a household kitchen.
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A hacker almost certainly has your data. What are you going to do about it?
By Stuart Layt
October 25, 2019 — 10.39pm
Somewhere, on a dusty server in the far reaches of the internet, a hacker has your data. Yes, you, reading this now.
The question, says international cyber security expert Davey Gibian, is: what are you going to do about it?
Mr Gibian is a White House presidential innovation fellow who has worked for the Pentagon as well as founded his own company, Calypso AI.
He visited Brisbane on Friday to speak to business and government leaders about cyber security and how artificial intelligence is going to change the way they do business in the future.
But the future, he told the representatives gathered at the presentation lunch, was now..
“The fact is, AI is already being embedded into mission-critical systems across organisations even if you don’t know it yet,” Mr Gibian said.
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Australia readies for cyber 'Pearl Harbour'
Oct 26, 2019 — 12.00am
The Morrison government is working on new powers to allow security agencies to defend critical private sector infrastructure from a "cyber Pearl Harbour" attack as concerns rise that Chinese hackers could launch an economic assault.
National security officials are worried foreign cyber attackers could exploit a loophole in laws by “short selling” shares and bonds to earn ill-gained profits, shutting down power networks and disrupting traffic management systems to hurt the economy and wreak havoc across society.
The government’s foreign cyber intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), has top-secret digital tools not available to the private sector that have the capacity to detect looming malware attacks and to launch counter-offensives.
But a gap in the law renders the government powerless to swiftly deploy the digital defence weapons on behalf of banks, financial markets, electricity networks and ports, largely limiting their use to public institutions and overseas.
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The Australian Health Agency to upgrade ‘My Health Record’ summary
Shreyas TannaOctober 24, 2019 ADHA Propaganda
The Australian Digital Wellbeing Organization today reported the update of My Health Record, an online, electronic summary of one’s key wellbeing data, with improved clinical work process abilities, which will empower social insurance suppliers to more effectively recognize and bunch together significant tests and results and give the most ideal medicinal services. This incorporates the monitoring tests, knowing when they were done and checking patients’ outcomes after some time.
As indicated by ADHA, in excess of 31 million clinical archives and more than 1.3 billion Medicare records have just been transferred to MHR. The update implies that Pathology and Analytic Imaging Reviews are naturally accessible from Clinical Data Framework applications that implemented the My Health Record Report List.
Before this overhaul, CIS sellers needed to do advancement work to execute the Pathology and DI Perspectives. Presently CIS applications that have actualized the MHR Report Rundown will have the option to give the Pathology and DI Reviews without extra improvement work from the CIS merchants.
Note: This has used AI to translate the text back and forth from Ancient Greek I believe!
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My Health Record: An extra tool in the toolbox
Oct24 ADHA Propaganda
Last year, in collaboration with the Australian Digital Health Agency (the Agency), Australian College of Nursing appointed six Nurse Champions to drive engagement with the My Health Record (MHR) across the country.
Sharon Downman FACN, a nurse and midwife with over 30 years’ experience, was one of the selected nurses for the Nurse Champion Program. We spoke with Sharon about her experience as a Nurse Champion and using and implementing MHR into her workplace.
· What made you apply to become a Nurse Champion for My Health Record?
I have always been interested in technology and how to best utilise it to obtain and access patient health care information that can be available to clinicians and patients. I am passionate about having a health care system that will support the people that it is for.
I previously worked at St Stephen’s Hospital which is now known as Australia’s first fully digital hospital. I also currently tutor students at James Cook University in the Informatics for Health Professionals Subject for the Master of Leadership and Management (Nursing).
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'We need to be able to look after these women': New tele-abortion service to 'fill gap' in abortion access
By Rachel Clun
October 25, 2019 — 10.52am
A new tele-abortion service will provide eligible women across the country online or phone consults and access to a medical abortion, in a move welcomed by Family Planning NSW.
Abortion Online aims to level out the current "postcode lottery" that makes medical abortion an expensive and difficult option for some women, the doctor leading the service said.
The service fills the gap left by the Tabbot Foundation, a national tele-abortion service that provided medical abortions to thousands of women across the country but wound up earlier this year due to financial pressures, BuzzFeed reported at the time.
Dr Emma Boulton said she began trialling a tele-abortion service through her Sydney clinic shortly after the closure of Tabbot's services, which she said had left a "big gap".
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'Your whole business is basically gone': Gillian Franklin hit by $2 million cyber attack
By Cara Waters
October 23, 2019 — 8.10am
Gillian Franklin says businesses need to overhaul their online security after she almost lost her business through a cyber attack.
The founder of cosmetics business The Heat Group logged on to her business from London on a Sunday earlier this year to discover all online documents and files were missing and were replaced by a ransom note demanding payment of the equivalent of $40,000 in Bitcoin.
The Heat Group turned over around $80 million last year and distributes some of the world's biggest cosmetic brands as well as its own brands, ulta3, Billie Goat, MUD Makeup Design and OZK.O eyewear. A Heat Group product is sold every three seconds.
Ms Franklin started the business 19 years ago and has led it through the financial crisis, legal battles and Ms Franklin's own diagnosis with breast cancer.
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https://www.hospitalhealth.com.au/content/technology/news/aimed-aims-to-transform-australian-health-care-with-ai-574784670
AIMed aims to transform Australian health care with AI
Thursday, 24 October, 2019
The AIMed series of global summits aims to bring together clinicians, hospital leaders and technology experts to kickstart a revolution in health care. The two-day event in Sydney from 12–13 November 2019 will showcase the transformative impact that AI-inspired technology is having on health care, providing a clinician-designed platform to discuss the latest developments and facilitate new ideas and partnerships.
Attendees will meet and hear from global and Australian speakers as they cover topics including machine learning and all aspects of AI, such as augmented and virtual reality, blockchain and cybersecurity, cloud AI, and Internet of Things and Everything (IoT and IoE).
The event will include a series of workshops covering AI in medicine, AI in medical imaging, and applications and challenges for AI in health.
Sessions include:
- Machine learning in medicine, evaluating the latest practical applications, successes and roadblocks or implementing AI and machine learning in medicine.
- An overview of the latest innovation in AI and data science in Australia, featuring clinicians that have moved on from research to practical case studies.
- Panel discussion: Are we ready for AI — exploring the complex themes of ethics, data and safety.
- AI in primary health care: Evaluating the perceptions, issues and challenges.
- Subspecialty highlights of AI applications: bringing the algorithm and data science to life — putting the patient at the heart.
- Panel session: What’s next for AI in Australia?
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Thursday, 24 October 2019 11:10
Australia, NZ record increased IT spending, despite worldwide slowdown
Spending on technology products and services in Australia is forecast to total $93.7 billion this year - up 3 percent from 2018 - and to grow 4.6 percent to reach almost $98 billion in 2020, in contrast to a global slowdown in IT spending forecast by Gartner.
And New Zealand is also set for growth in IT spending with Gartner forecasting the spend to reach NZ$13.4 billion this year - up 2.3 percent from 2018 - and to grow 3.6 percent to NZ$13.9 billion in 2020.
Globally, however, IT spending has slowed in 2019 with the latest forecast from Gartner projecting an increase of just 0.4% from 2018 to a total spend of US$3.7 trillion this year.
But despite what Gartner says is the lowest forecast growth in 2019 so far, it expects global IT spending to rebound in 2020 with forecast growth of 3.7%, primarily due to enterprise software spending.
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What Google's quantum breakthrough means
Oct 24, 2019 — 3.48pm
Google is standing by its claim that it had achieved one of the Holy Grails of quantum computing, building a quantum computer that could perform in minutes a calculation which would take a supercomputer 10,000 years to finish, despite IBM's claims that Google did no such thing.
A team of scientists at Google's quantum computer laboratories in Santa Barbara, California, claimed in the science journal Nature that they had pulled off an elusive "Quantum Supremacy" experiment, showing that their "Sycamore" quantum computer was able to do a maths problem that was all-but impossible for a classical computer to do.
Quantum computers harness the strange physical laws that govern the universe at the atomic scale, such as the fact that a photon of light can act as if it's in two places at the same time, and the fact that atomic particles can become "entangled" with each other so that the state of one particle affects the state of another particle, to make calculations that are practically impossible on computers that harness the classical laws of physics that control the universe at everything but the most minute scales.
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Google says quantum computer completes 10,000-year task in minutes
By Rachel Lerman and Matt O'Brien
October 24, 2019 — 12.34am
San Francisco: Google says it has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing research, saying an experimental quantum processor has completed a calculation in just a few minutes that would take a traditional supercomputer thousands of years.
The findings, published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, show that "quantum speedup is achievable in a real-world system and is not precluded by any hidden physical laws," the researchers wrote.
Quantum computing is a nascent and somewhat bewildering technology for vastly sped-up information processing. Quantum computers might one day revolutionise tasks that would take existing computers years, including the hunt for new drugs and optimising city and transportation planning.
The technique relies on quantum bits, or qubits, which can register data values of zero and one - the language of modern computing - simultaneously. Big tech companies including Google, Microsoft, IBM and Intel are avidly pursuing the technology.
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My Health Record
A My Health Record for every Australian in 2018 ADHA Propaganda
What is My Health Record?
My Health Record is an online summary of your health information. You control what goes into your record, and who is allowed to access it. Share your health information with doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers from anywhere, any time.
Healthcare providers such as GPs, specialists and pharmacists can add clinical documents about your health to your record. This includes:
- An overview of your health uploaded by your doctor, called a Shared Health Summary. This is a useful reference for new doctors or other healthcare providers that you visit
- Hospital discharge summaries
- Reports from test and scans, like blood tests
- Medications that your doctor has prescribed to you
- Referral letters from your doctors
Having a My Health Record means your important health information including allergies, current conditions and treatments, medicine details, pathology reports or diagnostic imaging scan reports can be digitally stored in one place.
As more people and their healthcare providers use the My Health Record system, Australia’s national health system will become better connected. This will result in faster and more efficient care for you and your family.
Find out more on the My Health Record website.
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Top scams that catch out many older Australians
By Emily Chantiri
October 22, 2019 — 2.49pm
It started out as a call similar to many others normally received from a telco service provider.
After moving house, Queenslanders John and wife Margaret were having difficulties with their internet and phone connection.
Perth seniors have been stung in an elaborate phone scam, targeting newly-connected NBN customers.
When a call came about their National Broadband Network connection, it did not feel out of place.
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Data deluge: Strict new consent rules to protect consumer info
By Emma Koehn
October 23, 2019 — 9.00am
Businesses face data sharing consent tests and multi-million dollar fines for breaching privacy requirements under rules for managing the deluge of customer information set to flow from next year under the country's 'Consumer Data Right'.
The Office of the Information Commissioner started asking businesses for feedback last week on draft privacy guidelines for properly dealing with customer data when it moves from one bank or energy company to another.
In February 2020, the consumer data right (CDR) will start its rollout with banks allowed to send customer information to other financial services businesses in the hopes of creating more competitive product offers. The scheme will then be extended to the energy and telecommunications sectors, before gradually being implemented across the Australian economy.
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Guidelines for improving privacy practices in the health sector
The OAIC has released a comprehensive new resource to provide advice for all health service providers covered by the Privacy Act 1988.
22 Oct 2019
The Guide to health privacy has been written specifically to assist GPs, practice staff and other health service providers understand their obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 and entrench good privacy procedures in their practice.
This resource comes at an opportune time, given that health service providers have ‘consistently’ been among the top three sources of privacy complaints to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) over the past three years, and the leading source of notifiable data breaches since mandatory notification started in February 2018.
Key steps outlined in the new guide are intended to guide health service providers in meeting privacy obligations and protect patient data:
This resource comes at an opportune time, given that health service providers have ‘consistently’ been among the top three sources of privacy complaints to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) over the past three years, and the leading source of notifiable data breaches since mandatory notification started in February 2018.
Key steps outlined in the new guide are intended to guide health service providers in meeting privacy obligations and protect patient data:
- Develop and implement a privacy management plan and assign responsible person/s
- Create a documented record of personal data the organisation handles
- Understand privacy obligations and implement processes to meet them, including staff training sessions
- Create a privacy policy and data breach response plan
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Facebook, the world’s most powerful adolescent, needs parental control
It is beyond the capabilities of a single company to make nuanced judgments about political debate in hundreds of countries and languages. As a result, increasing intervention by governments is inevitable, argues the FT's Gideon Rachman.
Oct 22, 2019 — 11.57am
The Instagram age has given rise to a new class — the “influencers”, who persuade their followers to buy and think in certain ways. But the biggest influencer of the lot is Facebook — the company that owns Instagram, WhatsApp as well as Facebook itself.
With 2.7 billion users — more than a third of the world’s population — Facebook is a massive, global political force, accused of everything from tipping the 2016 US presidential election to enabling genocide in Myanmar.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was once reluctant to acknowledge the company’s political power — initially rejecting the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the 2016 election as “crazy”. This attitude may have been naive or disingenuous, but it was certainly not sustainable.
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Time for industry to speak up on Australia’s encryption legislation
James Renwick
Oct 21, 2019 — 11.00am
Today, law abiding Australians are highly dependent on digital communications and devices, and digitised services, to conduct personal, corporate and government business: indeed, to live their lives.
Effective encryption is critical to ensuring the security and integrity of those activities, protecting us against criminal and other malicious actors whose motives may range from blackmail, to theft of money or identity, to espionage.
Equally, the security offered by encryption is being used by the same actors to shield them from investigation by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Australia’s response to this challenge was the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 – often referred to as encryption laws - which were introduced into Parliament last September.
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There's a good chance Beijing already has your face on file
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald
October 22, 2019 — 12.00am
The Hong Kong government's decision this month to use emergency laws for the first time in 52 years was very different to the way the same laws were last used. The change in tactics is telling.
In 1967, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution spilled across the border from mainland China into the British colony. Chinese Communist Party activists led riots and bombings that killed 51 people and injured 848 more. The British governor, David Trench, confronted the unrest very directly. His emergency ordinances gave him the power to shut down newspapers, ban any speech considered provocative, raid and order shut any premises including schools, seize weapons, conduct secret trials, require people to give names and ID to the police on demand, and, most controversially, to detain and deport suspects.
Police and protesters exchanged tear gas and petrol bombs as an illegal march descended into chaos.
Why was that the most controversial? Because anyone could be detained, even if they weren't actually breaking a law, according to a 2011 study by Ray Yep of the City University of Hong Kong. Once their jail terms were served, they could be summarily deported if they weren't British citizens. The governor called in helicopters from the Royal Navy to help conduct police raids. These measures worked.
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Facebook disables 'well-resourced' Russian, Iranian operations
By Tony Romm and Isaac Stanley-Becker
October 22, 2019 — 11.04am
Washington: Facebook on Monday said it removed Russian-backed accounts that showed some links to the Internet Research Agency, an indication of the persistence of the tech giant's disinformation problem a year before voters head to the ballot box.
In some cases the accounts posed as locals weighing in on political issues in swing states.
The Internet Research Agency is the Kremlin-backed entity that sowed social and political unrest during the 2016 presidential race.
Facebook described the network it disabled on Monday as a "well-resourced operation," focused on the US, "that took consistent operational security steps to conceal their identity and location."
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Facebook announces new steps to clamp down on misinformation ahead of 2020 election
By Elizabeth Culliford on Oct 22, 2019 6:56AM
To combat misinformation and voter suppression .
Facebook announced new steps to combat misinformation and voter suppression on Monday ahead of the November 2020 US presidential election, on the same day it disclosed the removal of a network of Russian accounts targeting US voters on Instagram.
Facebook said it would increase transparency through measures such as showing more information about the confirmed owner of a Facebook page and more prominently labeling content that independent fact-checkers have marked as false.
The social media giant has come under fire in recent weeks over its policy of exempting ads run by politicians from fact-checking, drawing ire from Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
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The ADHA FOI handling taking a long time to deliver what is asked for. Dragged on for over 1 year.
Here is the link to the finally extracted document:
Note the absurd level of redaction!
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ACSC should add the word 'censorship' to its name
After the shameful censorship it indulged in at CyberCon, the Australian Cyber Security Centre should seriously consider changing its name to the Australian Cyber Security and Censorship Centre.
The ACSC had combined its annual conference with that organised by the Australian Information Security Association from this year onwards and the conference was held in the second week of October.
On 8 October, it became known that talks to be given by two well-known technical people - Thomas Drake, a former employee of the NSA and a whistleblower, and Melbourne University Professor Dr Suelette Dreyfus - had both been pulled off the agenda.
Drake's talk was titled "The Golden Age of Surveillance", while Dr Dreyfus was due to speak on the use of secure and anonymous digital dropboxes as a means of fighting corruption.
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‘Informed choice’: significant data privacy reforms on the horizon for Australia
Following its recent detailed examination of the functioning of Australia’s digital economy, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has released its Digital Platforms Inquiry (DPI) Final Report.
The ACCC’s recommendations are wide ranging, and include a series of proposals relating to data privacy which, if implemented, would have broad impacts across the entire economy and significant implications for global businesses that deal with Australian consumers.
We also see the potential for some unintended adverse outcomes for consumers.
The case for reform
The primary focus of the DPI was digital platforms and the media. Digital platforms typically operate under a distinct business model providing services to consumers for zero monetary cost in exchange for their attention and use of their data. The platforms then 'monetise' that data by selling targeted advertising, from which they earn the majority of their revenue.
This business model poses some specific challenges in terms of data privacy, but the ACCC makes a case for ‘economy-wide’ reforms, citing a number of other sectors with data practices it considers to be similar, including financial institutions, telecommunications service providers, retailers offering rewards schemes, airlines and media businesses.
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Facebook boss hits out at 'backwards' ACCC privacy policies
Oct 21, 2019 — 10.00am
Australia's consumer protection watchdog has adopted a "backwards" approach to data privacy that will cause Australia to fall behind global best practice if implemented, Facebook's global head of privacy regulation says.
The approach, which would require companies such as Facebook to obtain consent from users whenever personal data was collected, will do nothing to improve user privacy but instead will simply cause Australians to be "bombarded" with consent warnings that they will soon ignore, said Melinda Claybaugh, Facebook's Washington-based Privacy Policy Director.
In July, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) handed down the findings of its far-reaching Digital Platforms Inquiry, recommending, among other things, that an ombudsman be established for big digital platforms such as Google and Facebook, and that those companies should be forced to develop a code of conduct for dealing with the fake news they disseminate.
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Let’s aim for “predoction”, not just prediction
Authored by Alex Olaussen
THE shining allure of artificial intelligence and its machine learning big data prediction is rapidly eclipsing medicine itself. The word “prediction” means to tell (dict) before (pre) something. It therefore follows that if prediction were optimised, it could help us avoid undesirable outcomes. Naturally, this proposal has attracted attention in all professional fields; including health care; however, there are some important caveats that are often forgotten.
Tremendous efforts have gone into prediction in medicine, and the dream of accurate prediction has been popular since the Framingham Heart Study. Lately, however, predictive models have gone through a growth spurt due to an ostensibly perfect match between more data being available (through electronic health records, home monitoring, e-health apps etc) and improved computers (through artificial intelligence, machine learning and enhanced raw processing power). The complexity of these models and their inability to be reproduced by most clinicians is creating a sense of confusion, but surprisingly, without the normally exercised, balanced scepticism. We are letting our guards down and welcoming these models into medicine due to a combination of desperation (as current models barely perform above that of a “coin flip” (eg, for hospital readmission) and their demonstrated success in other fields (eg, meteorology). However, before embarking on creating or optimising anything (eg, prediction models), one ought to ask: is it safe, and is it possible? And, if yes to both of those, is it desirable?
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The risk of the digital status quo: how governments can enable digital transformation
17 Oct 2019
Governments across the world are reaping the benefits of digital technologies, from creating efficiencies to enabling new services, and enhancing openness and transparency. Embracing technology, however, can be hampered by government leaders’ perceptions of and appetite for risk. Leaders tend to focus on assessing the risks and cost associated with embracing new technology and systems and can fail to account for the risks associated with maintaining the status quo.
This paper examines the repercussions of failing to adopt digital technologies to improve public services in Canada. It was informed by a series of interviews, a survey, and a roundtable discussion with senior Canadian public servants. The analysis also drew on the knowledge of 16 current and former government leaders from the United Kingdom, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, the United States and Canada to understand the global context around this issue and build new insights into how to overcome this challenge.
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Privacy watchdog's Facebook probe ongoing after 18 months
By Justin Hendry on Oct 21, 2019 6:50AM
Yet to hand down findings.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is still investigating Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal more than 18 months after its formal probe into the social media giant began.
The privacy watchdog opened its investigation in April 2018 following confirmation that approximately 311,000 Australians were part of the more than 87 million Facebook users globally that had personal data improperly shared with the political consultancy.
The probe was to consider whether Facebook had breached the country’s Privacy Act, which would involve OAIC its regulatory counterparts internationally.
“All organisations that are covered by the Privacy Act have obligations in relation to the personal information that they hold,” Australia privacy commissioner Angelene Falk said at the time.
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Author's Opinion
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of iTWire.
Saturday, 19 October 2019 10:37
AlphaBeta report shows NBN Co is fast approaching peak BS
The NBN Co's latest attempt to put lipstick on a pig — the animal in this case being the network it is building and the make-up in question being speed — goes one step further than the "alternative facts" which its former chief executive, Bill Morrow, used to dish out.
Under Stephen Rue, this function has been outsourced to a company named AlphaBeta which, in its latest effort, is fast approaching what can only be termed peak BS. Some of the claims in the report released — not in Australia, but in the Netherlands on Thursday — have no foundation.
But AlphaBeta's mission — for which it was paid out of taxpayer funds by the NBN Co — was apparently to "prove" that the speeds achievable by the NBN are far better than 59th in the world (which ranking was put down to the Ookla speed test in May) and actually much better.
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Comments more than welcome!
David.
5 comments:
https://www.ausdoc.com.au/opinion/gp-care-nbn-just-new-bloody-nuisance
For GP care, the NBN is just a New Bloody Nuisance
Just suppose Australian Healthcare was critically dependent on a centralised health record database.
Who would someone sue if their care had been severely impacted because vital data as unavailable?
I believe you might be correct regarding the AI generated article David, very confusing, but then certain government agency communication teams have a similar style.
I think AI might have written this headline - Australia readies for cyber 'Pearl Harbour'
What does a WW2 surprise Japanese air carrier attack on an American naval base in the pacific has to do with a perceive threat by China to assets it probably owns anyway?
They would be better focused on real national security issues like feeding and watering livestock and supplying water to crop growers.
https://www.cio.com.au/article/668015/adha-coo-defends-my-health-record-transparency/
Having to “defend” might be a client hat you are not being as transparent as you believe. Not sure who her speech writers are but would be wise to get a second opinion
"The Australian Government’s My Health Record offers a level of transparency around health and information data that people did not have before. This is according to the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) chief operating officer Bettina McMahon who spoke at this year’s Gartner IT Symposium about her own experience using the system.
McMahon said that one of the settings allows a user to get a text message every time someone is checking their files, so while at a GP’s consultation, for example, she gets warnings of her records being checked or updated."
If that's the best she can offer as an example of "transparency" then heaven help Australia.
And the ADHA.
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