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This weekly blog is to explore the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology 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 behaviour of a federal public agency gone rogue – and it just goes on! When you read this it will be well over 13 months of radio silence, and better still the CEO, COO and the Chief of Staff have also gone. I wonder will things improve now – so far seems not?
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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Spies being left exposed in the digital age
By Ben Macintyre
The Times
2:34AM January 19, 2020
Concealment is the essence of espionage. Spies have long relied on being able to hide their identities and slip from one jurisdiction to another. The spy has no name and many names.
Not any more. In the digital world of interconnected surveillance, facial recognition and ubiquitous CCTV, where every computer keystroke leaves a digital fingerprint, it is becoming ever harder to hide. This is a problem for terrorists and criminals as well as spies.
The two principal branches of gathering information are signals intelligence (Sigint) – intercepting exchanges through technology – and human intelligence (Humint) – information gathered from, and by, individuals. The flood of Sigint in the modern age is a threat to Humint and is changing the very nature of espionage.
Intelligence officers have traditionally been sent abroad to operate under diplomatic cover. In 2014 hackers believed to be working for China broke into the computers of the US Office of Personnel Management. The data of 22 million former and serving civil servants, including intelligence officers, was stolen.
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‘Tech is tearing us apart’
The balance between humankind and technology has reached a tipping point, says this Silicon Valley insider – and we all stand to lose.
By Ben Hoyle
January 17, 2020
Reporting can be a scary job. I have had nervous moments with warlords, gangsters and neo-Nazis. I have been shot at and threatened. Once I had to endure, without displaying any outward sign of panic, the whole of Tonight’s the Night, the Rod Stewart musical. But if Tristan Harris is right, the presentation playing now on his phone is the most frightening thing I’ve seen in my life. It’s a road map for the erosion of civilisation as we know it.
Harris, 35, is a former Google insider who has been called “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” and a “Silicon Valley apostate”. He believes we’re in the midst of a great social upheaval caused by technology companies that view the world’s 2.7 billion smartphone users as a resource whose attention they can mine for profit. The resulting competition has a very unfortunate side-effect: “attention capitalism” is making us nastier, stupider and much less likely to find common ground with our fellow humans.
We can try to resist, but it is not a fair fight. Whenever you open Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, you switch on what Harris calls “a voodoo doll-like version of you in a supercomputer”. It consists of nearly everything you’ve ever clicked on, liked or watched. That’s how these companies keep you ensnared: they know you better than you know yourself.
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What are your privacy rights at work?
By James Adonis
January 17, 2020 — 12.00am
It’s unlikely people have ever been more switched on about their privacy rights than at this present moment.
I still recall how frenzied it was when the Privacy Act was launched in Australia decades ago, with many of us in customer service fearful we’d contravene it accidentally.
Fast forward to today and that experience pales in comparison to how sensitive we’ve become. It’s a level of sensitivity boosted with every new data breach and every fresh media exposé.
The workplace is one location where privacy dilemmas are both delicate and complex in what is often a tug-of-war between bosses and employees.
On the side of bosses is a need for more insights on their workers. This could be relatively mild, such as whether they’re using company computers for personal use, or significantly more serious such as whether they’ve been found guilty of a crime.
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A guide to My Health Record
https://ashm.org.au/resources/ASHM_MHR.pdf - Resource Link
This guide has been developed to support healthcare providers in their discussions about the My Health Record with patients who may experience stigma and possible adverse consequences due to their living with a blood borne virus (such as HIV, HBV, HCV or co-infections) or sexual health concerns, because they use drugs or have sex work experience.
Such individuals may have concerns about using My Health Record due to the serious personal consequences which may result from unwanted disclosure of health information, including criminal prosecutions and refusal of services.
This guide should help healthcare workers to discuss the nuances of how the record may benefit patients, including how the record’s access controls can help protect sensitive information and other issues that should they should be aware of.
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Screen scraper ban touted to weed out data predators
By Julian Bajkowski on Jan 15, 2020 1:13PM
Demands for crackdown on FinTech underbelly.
Two of Australia’s most prominent consumer protection advocates have warned policymakers that a failure to ban the endemic practice of commercial screen scraping under new consumer data laws will allow predators to flourish and infest Australia’s fintech sector.
As Australia’s banks and utilities sectors brace for new account portability laws to hit this year, the Financial Rights Legal Centre and the Consumer Action Law Centre have cautioned a major clean-up of data regulations is urgently needed to stop a new generation of shonks coming along for the ride.
The call to ban screen scraping is a major headache for some banks and financial services providers hoping to continue using the technology as a fudge to get around stubborn legacy systems that are costly to modify for open banking.
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New tool aims to minimise medication errors
The Australian Digital Health Agency and aged care medication management specialists Webstercare have launched an e-health record initiative to improve the management of medications.
The Pharmacist Shared Medicines List consolidates the prescription and non-prescription medicines, such as over-the-counter pain killers, vitamins and herbal remedies, prepared by a pharmacist.
The PSML is uploaded to a person’s My Health Record to help aged care and healthcare providers make informed prescribing and treatment decisions and assist in reducing medication errors.
Webstercare, which has worked with the ADHA for two years planning and developing the protocols and security requirements for the software, became the first to use the PSML in December.
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Why cyber security will be key issue in 2020s
Geopolitics and technological advances mean cyber deterrence is as important as the business cycle for financial, investment and economic decisions.
Stirling Larkin Columnist
Jan 15, 2020 — 12.00am
It was peculiar that so speedily after the drone assassination of Iranian Qassem Soleimani there were immediate warnings in the US, Europe, NATO members and allies, such as Australia and Canada, to expect Iranian cyber warfare counter-subterfuge.
Beyond cyber security being merely a commercial-industrial consideration, this was the first time on the international stage that it was recognised as an imminent likelihood.
Only weeks into this new era, already dubbed the “roaring 2020s”, geopolitics has conflated with technological advances and economic necessities to mean cyber deterrence is as important as the business cycle when considering financial, investment and economic decisions.
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Wilson Gavin: Online pile-on mob is medieval in its malice
This tweet is no longer available.
Go now to Twitter — yes, I know, why would anyone? — and you will find messages like that popping up pretty much everywhere after prominent Australians hurried to delete their mean tweets about Wilson Gavin, who killed himself on Monday.
Gavin, who was gay and conservative and just 21, threw himself in front of a train.
He is lost now — to his family, and his wide group of friends.
The train driver will never recover. Also the passengers. And those who watched in horror.
“Don’t care. He started it.”
That’s just one of the tweets that appeared online after his death was announced.
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4 January 2020
New peak digital health body might hold key to future
Just prior to Christmas, Australia’s core community of digital health practitioners, in the form of the Health Information Society of Australia (HISA), voted to merge with the major emerging digital health education and training group, the Australian College of Health Informatics (ACHI), to form a new and much larger peak digital health body, to be called the Australasian Institute of Digital Health.
The merger is significant for a number of reasons. It is likely to push the influence and skillsets of the HISA group, whose origins and traditional focus was in hospital informatics, much further into the primary and allied care sector, as the realities of true healthcare system interoperability start to bite.
A key reason for the merger according to HISA CEO Dr Louise Schaper was the recognition by both groups of the need to ramp up the provision of much better pathways for the education and training of a digital health workforce in Australia.
“What’s going on in healthcare, and what our members are telling us, is there is growing momentum around the need for a digitally enabled health workforce,” Dr Schaper told The Medical Republic.
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Creator of Webster-pak becomes first organisation to start using the Pharmacist Shared Medicines List in My Health Record
13 January 2020 ADHA Propaganda
On 20 December 2019, the Australian Digital Health Agency together with Webstercare launched a new clinical document within My Health Record - the Pharmacist Shared Medicines List (PSML) in order to reduce medication-related problems in Australia.
PSML is a consolidated list of prescription and non-prescription medicines including over-the-counter and complementary medicines that is curated by a pharmacist and uploaded to a patient's My Health Record.
Click here for more information.
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What is the ‘Pharmacist Shared Medicines List’?
A new clinical document has been launched within My Health Record to reduce medication-related problems in Australia
The Australian Digital Health Agency has launched a new clinical document, the Pharmacist Shared Medicines List (PSML), within My Health Record.
The PSML is a consolidated list of medicines prepared by a pharmacist and uploaded to a patient’s My Health Record.
It compiles both prescription and non-prescription medicines, including over-the-counter and complementary medicines, such as vitamins and herbal remedies.
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Myopia epidemic occurring long before handheld device 'screen time'
Professor Mackey is a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Western Australia.
13th January 2020
The number of people with myopia has increased dramatically in recent years in various regions of the world.
For example, in many cities in China more than 90% of university students are living with myopia. In pure numbers, this is one of the largest epidemics humanity has even seen, far greater than the obesity epidemic.
The myopia boom was first noted in the 1980s in the cities of East Asian countries such as Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. The cities of China followed soon afterwards, and a similar trend is being noted in Europe.
From blur to blindness
For most people, myopia is merely an inconvenience requiring correction with glasses, contact lenses or refractive surgery.
Notably, myopia is associated with an increased risk of blindness from retinal detachment, glaucoma and myopic macular degeneration. Risk of blindness increased with worsening severity of myopia and this is a major public health concern.
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Social media and online privacy
There are many online platforms or applications that involve the sharing of large amounts of personal information. You can protect your privacy by being aware of, and actively using, the privacy settings of these platforms and your devices, as well as understanding your legal rights. Our top ten general privacy tips can also help you protect your personal information.
In this section
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Don't hide hacks: cyber security boss
Jan 13, 2020 — 12.00am
Federal government cyber security officials are trying to help business fend off an unprecedented level of digital attacks against banks, energy grids and other critical infrastructure, and imploring private firms not to cover up hacks.
Amid warnings that wars of the 21st century will be fought in cyberspace against foreign countries and criminals, the government is developing new proposed powers so security agencies can better defend critical private-sector infrastructure from cyber attacks by Chinese and other hackers.
The departing head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, Rachel Noble, told The Australian Financial Review that the government wanted to work closely with business to protect assets crucial to the economy and community.
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Comments more than welcome!
David.
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