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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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Services Australia reckons 'robo-debt' error rate sits at 1%
If the former DHS issues a debt notice, and the former welfare receiver fixes it, that is the system working, according to Services Australia.
Services Australia believes the error rate for its contentious robo-debt program sits at around 1%.
The assertion was made by Service Australia general manager of integrity modernisation Jason McNamara at a Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee hearing in Canberra on Thursday.
"As a general rule, we find the error rate relates to data entry because when someone rings up, and they require assistance and they are essentially giving us the information over the phone, sometimes we will do a data entry [error] -- we will transpose numbers et cetera -- and that tends to be our major error," he said.
"But we still think that error rate is under 1% in this program."
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From health benefit to hazard. Where My Health Record went wrong
- Time Tue Oct 29 2019 at 05:30 pm to 06:30 pm
· Venue The Stables, 888 Hay Street, Perth, Australia
From health benefit to hazard. Where My Health Record went wrong
My Health Record failed to deliver its promised benefits for numerous reasons. Worse, it has exposed the public to abuse of confidentiality and could in many circumstances negatively impact both treatment and health outcomes. What should have been done instead?
BIO
Dr David Glance is director of the UWA Centre for Software Practice, a UWA research and development centre. Dr Glance worked in the finance and software industry for over 20 years at companies such as the Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Microsoft, Tibco and IONA Technologies before spending the last 18 years at UWA. The UWA CSP provides training and research opportunities for students and has developed commercial software in the health and education sectors that is being used across Australia in hospitals, GP clinics and aboriginal medical services.
BIO
Dr David Glance is director of the UWA Centre for Software Practice, a UWA research and development centre. Dr Glance worked in the finance and software industry for over 20 years at companies such as the Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Microsoft, Tibco and IONA Technologies before spending the last 18 years at UWA. The UWA CSP provides training and research opportunities for students and has developed commercial software in the health and education sectors that is being used across Australia in hospitals, GP clinics and aboriginal medical services.
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4 October 2019
All aboard the PIP QI exemption! But hang on, who is liable and who pays?
An increasing number of practice managers and owners are expressing concern and confusion of the Department of Health’s latest attempt to bridge the complexity around how a practice will share de-identified data with its PHN in order to qualify for the PIP QI.
In a possible acknowledgement that the new PIP QI data scheme needs a lot more time and thinking on the part of all parties in order to sort out governance, security, and in some cases, practice technology, the department early this week sent an email to practices titled: “Urgent – PIP QI Time Limited Extension Update”.
The exemption extension email provides a form for practices to complete which still wish to receive their PIP QI for data delivery to their PHN, but aren’t able to deliver the data because either their technology is not capable, or they don’t have a suitable understanding or agreement with their PHN in place.
In order to be eligible for the extension for the last quarter of this year, you only have until October 15 to make your decision on signing, and thereafter you will need to exempt yourself in January, April and July, if you want the full extension.
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Privacy clash looms: US joins Australia in pushing Facebook on encryption
· Dow Jones
US Attorney General William Barr is asking Facebook Inc. to hold off on plans to add encryption throughout its messaging services, citing public safety in a push to force the social-media giant to delay a major strategic shift outlined by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year.
Mr Barr is making the request in an open letter also signed by his British and Australian counterparts, set to be published Friday.
The letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, asks the company to delay the encryption plan until it figures out a way to provide government access to the services for investigative purposes.
The letter from Mr Barr was also signed by Kevin McAleenan, acting secretary of homeland security, along with U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel and Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton.
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Fighting the power of Google
ACCC boss Rod Sims is hoping the federal government gives him power and money to investigate ad tech’s role on the media industry, but some wonder whether by the time it happens the game will already be over.
Right now the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platform team has a budget of $4 million over four years, while last year Google’s revenue increased 23 per cent to $US136.8 billion.
The same asymmetry applies in ad tech, because Google controls the input, the output and the exchange mechanism by which the market operates.
It’s as if it controlled the ASX, determined which companies listed in the ASX and collected fees on the investments made in the market from the big industry funds, while also controlling which funds acquired which stocks.
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Leveraging My Health Record to improve practice workflow - a session for practice managers
Wednesday, 09 October 2019 - Wednesday, 09 October 2019 ADHA Propaganda
Time: 12:30PM - 1:30PM
Venue: Online
This webinar is intended for practice managers and will provide an overview of the My Health Record system, highlighting the benefits for the practice, the providers and the patient. Content will cover strategies on how to embed My Health Record to improve practice workflow and increase efficiencies. There will be an opportunity for Q&A during this session.
Suitable for practice managers.
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Australian Digital Platforms Inquiry makes major legislative recommendations
This summer, Australia’s competition regulator, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), released its final report in the landmark Digital Platforms Inquiry (Inquiry), following a period of consultation on its preliminary report which was published on 10 December 2018.
If the recommendations in the final report are implemented, then they will have a profound impact on the regulation of the media, privacy and platforms in Australia.
Scope of the ACCC Inquiry
The Inquiry was directed by the Australian government to consider the impact of online search engines, social media and digital content aggregators (digital platforms) on competition in the media and advertising services markets, in particular in relation to the supply of news and journalistic content, and the implications of this for media content creators, advertisers and consumers.
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How embracing technology can make life easier for the healthcare sector
Healthcare workers can often feel like a very small cog in the very big machine that is the healthcare system. From doctors and nurses to administration staff, there is little doubt that with an increasing ageing population in both Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), healthcare workers are expected to find ways to do more with less.
Recent research suggests that ANZ-based healthcare workers are very open to embracing new technologies in the workplace, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, especially if it can help to make their jobs more efficient. This is according to findings from a survey by technology provider Genesys.
The survey, which focused on employee attitudes about the implementation of advanced technologies in the workplace, found almost 70% of respondents from the healthcare sector believe technology makes them more efficient at work, and 35% responded saying AI had already made a positive impact on their job.
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'We will go the mat and fight': Facebook's Zuckerberg takes aim at Elizabeth Warren in leaked tapes
By Rex Crum
October 2, 2019 — 7.11am
It sounds like Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg might be taking some business lessons from the classic film The Godfather at least with regard to the possibility of Elizabeth Warren becoming president.
Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts who is running for president, has called upon the United States government to break up Facebook, as well as Google and Amazon, due to what she sees as those companies' overwhelming dominance of social media, the internet, and technology, in general. Earlier this year, Warren laid out her plan for breaking up the tech giants should she be elected president in 2020.
However, Zuckerberg doesn't intend on taking Warren's potential company break-up efforts laying down, even though he may have plans to go to the mattresses like the Corleone family did during when it battled other organized crime families in director Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 cinematic classic.
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Monday, 30 September 2019 19:00
Digital platforms inquiry: govt hints it may go easy on tech giants
Federal Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has given a hint as to how the Coalition Government would react to the digital platforms inquiry report which was handed over to it by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in July, claiming during a recent speech that the loss of revenue suffered by traditional media due to the dominance of digital technology firms like Google and Facebook may not be as bad as suggested.
In a speech to agency and media executives, reported by The Australian, Fletcher used advertising data released last week as the basis for saying: "(The data) tells some quite interesting stories, because there’s a conventional wisdom about the media and communications sector, which is that the new digital platforms are dominating; the traditional Australian businesses in the media sector dying."
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Border Force deploy iPhones for roving airport biometric checks
By Justin Hendry on Oct 1, 2019 6:55AM
Confirms identity in less than 60 seconds.
The next time you pass through one of Australia’s ten international airports, don’t be surprised to see Border Force officers using shiny new iPhones to check the identities of overseas travellers of interest.
After trialling the Apple devices as portable biometric scanners at Brisbane international airport during 2017, the Department of Home Affairs has quietly finished deploying the smartphones to its frontline officers.
A spokesperson told iTnews the rollout at all international airports was completed in late 2018, allowing roaming officers to “quickly undertake biometric identity checks of non-citizen travellers”.
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Proposed data-matching laws could lead to excessive monitoring of GPs: RACGP
The sweeping new laws would, if passed, allow the Federal Government to match datasets from the Medicare Benefits Schedule and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
30 Sep 2019
The laws, which are currently out for stakeholder consultation, would also allow the Government to compare these with other major datasets, representing a major increase in potential compliance activity.
RACGP President Dr Harry Nespolon warned that this type of escalation in compliance activities must be done carefully.
‘We support the maintenance of the integrity of Medicare, but there are always concerns that data matching may be used for reasons other than ensuring the integrity of the system,’ he told newsGP.
‘We would also caution that if the matching process becomes too complex, it may produce inaccurate results or results that are misinterpreted.’
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RACGP President Dr Harry Nespolon warned that this type of escalation in compliance activities must be done carefully.
‘We support the maintenance of the integrity of Medicare, but there are always concerns that data matching may be used for reasons other than ensuring the integrity of the system,’ he told newsGP.
‘We would also caution that if the matching process becomes too complex, it may produce inaccurate results or results that are misinterpreted.’
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Top 10 healthcare platforms with potential to win in transformation
September 27, 2019
Healthcare has begun to lurch towards the era of open system, APIs and digital platform based connectivity. This is a new ecosystem where data rules and where typically, only a few major platforms will end up as the gatekeepers of workflow and data transaction. Who might win in this transformational period?
With more than 270 individual software vendors serving the doctor community in Australia it’s not all that surprising that there is a lot of discontinuity in how our healthcare system is wired together. GP and specialists are relatively computerised, but only with deskbound systems relying on local servers or offsite managed servers for one location. There is virtually no real connectivity like you see in other digitally transformed markets, or an internet sharing layer – yet.
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PHN data arrangements a bit of a mess
September 27, 2019
GP bodies remain uneasy with data-sharing arrangements under the Practice Incentive Payment – Quality Improvement, despite having won a reprieve of sorts without sacrificing the payments promised.
GP bodies remain uneasy with data-sharing arrangements under the Practice Incentive Payment – Quality Improvement, despite having won a reprieve of sorts without sacrificing the payments promised.
The Australian GP Alliance (AGPA) and the RACGP say the incentive scheme is poorly designed, insecure and unready, but that the Health Department is “holding a financial gun to GPs’ heads”.
Worth up to $50,000 a year for the largest practices, the PIP QI requires the sharing of deidentified patient data with your Primary Health Network using data-extraction software supplied by the PHN, such as Polar or Pen CAT.
The data, which is deidentified before it leaves the practice, will be analysed at the PHN stage to yield 10 improvement measures (including the proportion of patients with smoking status recorded, the proportion of female patients with up-to-date cervical screening, and so on). The data will then be sent to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare for national-level analysis.
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30 September 2019
Genomics bringing medicine out of the data dark ages
Healthcare is a huge cottage industry ready to metamorphose into a data-intensive one, says Australian genomics pioneer John Mattick AO – it just needs to get out of its own way.
Soon, Professor Mattick says, a complete genome sequence will be standard in every individual’s health record, with all its implications at GPs’ fingertips; it will be unacceptable to treat a cancer without sequencing the tumour; and drug selection and dose will be tuned to take account of how fast people metabolise them, reducing waste and hospital admissions.
As sequencing and computational capacity goes up and the costs come down, it will be up to the medical establishment to show foresight and embrace the the benefits of this data for healthcare.
“Health is the biggest industry in the world, and it’s largely still in Florence Nightingale territory,” says Professor Mattick, the recipient of Advance’s 2019 Global Impact Award. The Advance awards recognise influential Australians making remarkable contributions abroad.
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The 'new age of tech anxiety'
By Brad Smith
September 30, 2019 — 12.00am
Increasingly this new technology era has ushered in a new age of anxiety. This tension is the most pronounced in the world's democracies. Wracked by unease about immigration, trade, and income inequality, these nations increasingly confront populist and nationalist fissures that result in part from seismic technology shifts.
Technology's benefits aren't distributed evenly, and the nature and speed of change is challenging individuals, communities, and entire nations. Democratic societies collectively confront greater challenges than they've faced in almost a century, and in some cases other countries are using technology itself to exploit this vulnerability.
The tech sector is trying to come to terms with forces that are bigger than any one company or even the entire industry. It's not just about trends and ideas, but about people, decisions, and actions to address a rapidly changing world.
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Why consumer data right will change your life
Australian Information Commissioner Act 2010 (Cth).
The CDR is intended to give Australian consumers and small businesses (Consumers) greater choice and convenience while promoting business efficacy. This will be done by Consumers having a right to access and authorise the sharing of their data that relates to their use of a product held by businesses with other third party providers. The sharing of this data is intended to assist Consumers to compare and negotiate better product deals offered by providers (s 5 of the Act). The CDR will be implemented across all sectors of the economy; however, it will initially be applied to the banking, energy and telecommunications sectors (s 5 of the Act).
Amendments Post Federal Election
Following public consultation, the Government made minor revisions to the draft 2018 bill prior to re-introducing it to Parliament. Some of the main amendments are as follows:
- Under section 56BS(1) the ACCC is permitted to make emergency rules without public consultation and without the Minister’s consent. This is applicable when the ACCC has a belief, which does not need to be reasonable (as was originally proposed), as to avoid necessary risk of serious harm to the efficiency, integrity or stability of the Australian economy or the interests of consumers. However, the ACCC must provide the Minister with a written explanation for the need of such rules and has the power to vary or appeal the emergency data rule. Further, the ‘emergency’ rule will cease to be in force from 6 months from when it was made if the Minister and the Information Commissioner were not consulted at the time of implementation.
- The 2019 CDR detailed that in making ordinary and emergency CDR rules, the ACCC must have regard to the impact on consumers, markets, privacy and confidentiality, competition, intellectual property and the public interest and the regulatory impact of regulation (s 56BP, 56BS(1) of the Act).
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Going Wayback: The current state of using wayback machine evidence in court
The admissibility of print-outs from the “Wayback Machine – Internet Archive” website (Wayback Evidence) is increasingly being considered by the Federal Court of Australia. The decision of Justice Burley in Dyno Nobel Inc v Orica Explosives Technology Pty Ltd (No 2) [2019] FCA 1552 on 17 September 2019 provides clear insight to the Court’s approach to Wayback Evidence and the circumstances in which it might be admissible.
The use of Wayback Evidence is particularly relevant for intellectual property disputes, for example, to establish the time periods for use of a trade mark or to glean the common general knowledge at a certain point in time when assessing patent validity.
Background
Dyno Nobel Inc (Dyno) brought proceedings against Orica Explosives Technology Pty Ltd (Orica) seeking to revoke Orica’s patent. For the purposes of assessing obviousness of the patent, Dyno sought to rely on Wayback Evidence depicting the form of a website operated by Orica at www.i-konsystem.com prior to the patent’s priority date (Ikon Materials). Such evidence formed part of the affidavit of an employee of the Wayback Machine – Internet Archive (Internet Archive) and was being relied upon by Dyno to establish specific aspects of the common general knowledge at that time. Orica objected to the admissibility of the Ikon Materials on the basis that they constituted hearsay under the Evidence Act 1995 (Cth) and did not qualify for an exception to the hearsay rule.
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Sunday, 29 September 2019 03:56
More than half of Australian office workers have had their data compromised
Over half (56%) of Australian office workers have had their data compromised as part of a breach or hack, including nearly 3 in 10 (28%) more than once, according to a survey of office workers in Australia, the US, UK and Japan.
According to the survey report - Hook, Line and Sinker: Why Phishing Attacks Work - by global IT security company Webroot, and undertaken in partnership with Wakefield Research, 30% of the Australian respondents did not take the basic step of changing their passwords after the incident, and only 1 in 3 (33%) informed a government agency.
Webroot says that not only is this false confidence potentially harmful to an employee’s personal and financial data, “but it also creates risks for companies and their data”.
The survey also revealed that while a majority of Australian office workers (91%) reported being able to distinguish a phishing message from a genuine one, more than half (60%) also admitted to having clicked on a link from an unknown sender while at work - especially from email (75%).
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Plan for massive facial recognition database sparks privacy concerns
Identity fraud is justification for collecting photos from drivers’ licences and passports but critics say plan too invasive
Sun 29 Sep 2019 06.00 AEST Last modified on Sun 29 Sep 2019 09.47 AEST
If you’ve had a driver’s licence photo or passport photo taken in Australia in the past few years, it’s likely your face will end up in a massive new national network the federal government is trying to create.
Victoria and Tasmania have already begun to upload driver’s licence details to state databases that will eventually be linked to a future national one.
Legislation before federal parliament will allow government agencies and private businesses to access facial IDs held by state and territory traffic authorities, and passport photos held by the foreign affairs department.
The justification for what would be the most significant compulsory collection of personal data since My Health Record is cracking down on identity fraud.
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Comments more than welcome!
David.
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