Here are a few I have come across the last week or so. Note: Each link is followed by a title and a few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
General Comment
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The system is slowly coming back to life, but it is clear the awful bushfires are totally dominating the news cycle. I feel this is some sort of watershed for our nation and am at once very sad for the victims and amazingly proud of the work of the firefighters. They are a pretty special bunch!
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Doctors refuse to use the $1.5 billion My Health Record
Sue Dunlevy, National Health Reporter, News Corp Australia Network
January 10, 2020 8:00pm
Exclusive: It’s cost taxpayers $1.5 billion but the online My Health Record is at risk of becoming a white elephant, with barely more than one per cent of patients accessing it.The record, which was created for any Australian who did not actively opt out last January, is also being ignored by doctors who don’t trust it to be up to date.
The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) reports there are now 1.6 billion medical documents on the records including blood test and scan results and medical histories.
But around half the records are merely empty shells — only 12.5 million of the 22.6 million records have any documents in them, the ADHA has revealed.
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Mater health system’s digital transformation journey
“Our goal is to make all of a patient’s health record available in our clinical portal so that when a clinician brings up a patient’s record, they can have all the information they need,” said S. Wissmann, director of information management, Mater.
By: Hyland
November 07, 2019 09:23 PM
The challengeHealth records contain a hybrid of information — multiple types of information existing in various formats across departments documenting different attendances.
Mater Misericordiae Ltd (Mater), a seven-hospital health system in South Brisbane, Australia needed a better way to put all patient information into the hands of its clinicians. “Anything that existed on paper or in another physical format was disconnected from the patient information our clinicians accessed through our clinical portal,” said Sallyanne Wissmann, director of information management. “In order to get the information they needed, our clinicians had to rely on either the records arriving through a push model or they’d submit requests and wait for them to arrive.”
The solution
The health system implemented Hyland’s OnBase enterprise information platform across all seven of its hospitals. Mater deployed OnBase in the health information management (HIM), ambulatory, outpatient and revenue cycle areas, and integrated it with its clinical portal.
Staff now scan all new clinical documentation — inpatient, ambulatory, emergency, attendances — into OnBase, which has also significantly reduced the need to provide paper charts.
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Adopting a patient-centric approach to care, even beyond ICT
An interview with James Patterson, CIO, NSW Health Pathology.
By Dean Koh
January 06, 2020 11:31 PM
Operating more than 60 laboratories with around 200 pathology collection services in NSW public hospitals and community health facilities, NSW Health Pathology employs over 4,000 staff and conducts more than 61 million tests a year. As one of Australia’s largest public pathology providers, NSW Health Pathology requires a massive clinical and non-clinical IT infrastructure in order to carry out its operations. In an email interview with HealthcareIT News, James Patterson, CIO of NSW Health Pathology talks about their recent Point of Care Testing (PoCT) project and shared some of his thoughts on his role/work as a CIO.
Q. Could you tell us more about your role as CIO at NSW Health Pathology?
A. NSW Health Pathology is an agency within NSW Health and we are also Australia’s largest public pathology providers. As CIO I am responsible for both clinical and non-clinical systems we use.
Pathology is a very automated business – NSW Health Pathology generated more than 285 million test results from our laboratories in 2018-19 – and so is a large ICT user within the Health landscape.
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Noticeboard: Changes in digital health leadership
The Australian government’s digital health agency has announced the resignation of its chief executive officer and the appointment of an interim CEO while it searches for a permanent replacement.The Australian Digital Health Agency announced the resignation of Tim Kelsey last month.
Mr Kelsey, who became CEO in 2016, has led the digital health agency through the rollout of the My Health Record to more than 22 million Australians and the introduction of e-prescribing.
The following week the agency announced its former chief operating officer Bettina McMahon as incoming interim CEO.
Ms McMahon recently announced her resignation after 10 years at the agency and its predecessor the National E-Health Transition Authority but has delayed her departure until a permanent CEO is found.
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The medical community is ill-prepared for the rise of e-sports: doctors
Antony is a medical reporter with a special interest in technology and pharmacy.
9th January 2020
The International Olympic Committee is wrangling with a billion-dollar controversy right now — and it’s nothing to do with banning Russia from the 2020 Tokyo Games for systematic doping.It’s whether e-sports — competitive matches of video games such as League of Legends, Call of Duty or Hearthstone — should be added to the medal roster.
It has rejected the idea for Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024. However, after its most recent Olympic summit in December, it claimed to “see great potential for co-operation and incorporating them into the sports movement”.
But an international group of doctors have declared that e-sports should be considered 'sport' right now.
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'Totally useless': Specialist fees website launches without any specialists
The government had promised to provide a searchable database by 1 January 2020
9th January 2020
By Kemal Atlay
The Federal Government’s long-awaited medical fee transparency website has been labelled “totally useless” in its failure to allow patients to look up the names of individual specialists, let alone find details of their fees.The so-called Medical Costs Finder, launched in late December, was built to help patients avoid ‘bill shock’ from unexpected medical expenses.
The Minister for Health, Greg Hunt, had promised the searchable database of specialists and their fees — starting with oncologists, obstetricians and gynaecologists — would be up and running by 1 January 2020
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Ransomware shuts down Travelex systems
Unpatched systems could be attack vector, say researchers.
Forex multinational Travelex has confirmed that the "software virus" that forced the company to take all of its systems offline is the REvil/Sodinokibi ransomware.The ransomware attack took place on New Year's Eve, forcing Travelex branches to manually handle transactions as online services were suspended in order to contain the spread of the ransomware and to protect data.
Travelex says it has now restored a number of internal systems to normal operation.
The company said it has completed the containment stage of its remediation process, and that detailed forensic analysis is underway.
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Ransomware attack on Travelex hits major banks, including Westpac
· Dow Jones
A New Year’s Eve ransomware attack on foreign currency exchange company Travelex has disrupted cash deliveries from its global network of vaults to major international banks.
Banks in the UK, including units owned by Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, as well as Australia’s Westpac, said they were unable to take orders from customers in branches that rely on Travelex to supply cash in foreign currencies. The banks’ online retail foreign currency exchange services, which are outsourced to Travelex, were also shut off.
Travelex’s internal networks and consumer-facing websites and app have been offline since the attack, after the company shut down its computer systems to stop a ransomware virus that infiltrated its networks.
-----Increasing fire threat to vulnerable telecommunications networks
By Fergus Hunter and Zoe Samios
January 11, 2020 — 12.00am
Australia's unprecedented bushfire crisis has exposed the vulnerability of phone and internet networks, prompting Communications Minister Paul Fletcher to warn telecommunications giants to prepare for increasingly severe disasters.As dozens of mobile towers went dark during this summer's catastrophic bushfires, people have been cut off from contact with emergency services and in some cases unable to pay for essential supplies. Telcos have scrambled to bolster their networks and respond to the outages, rolling out satellite trucks, portable reception towers and restoring disabled mobile base stations.
Telstra is working to get telecommunications back up and running in fire-ravaged communities in Victoria.
Telstra revealed its network experienced "critical damage" as 36 mobile towers were knocked out in bushfires in rapidly-changing conditions, but more than half of those were now back online.
Mr Fletcher welcomed the rapid responses by Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and the government-owned national broadband network (NBN) but said questions need to be asked about the long-term resilience of telecommunications infrastructure critical to Australians' safety during emergencies.
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A Wi-Fi router that can detect your breathing
Jan 9, 2020 — 1.07pm
Wi-Fi signals that get into every corner of your house may one day be able to get under your skin, quite literally.At the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas, Origin Wireless AI said it has figured out how to read the pulse of occupants of a household, just by measuring the minute perturbations in Wi-Fi signals that people create when they move through the signal.
Origin Wireless AI, a US-based startup which supplies artificial intelligence software to the popular home Wi-Fi brand Linksys, has already developed software which can detect when people enter a house, which rooms they walk to, and what their breathing rate is, just from analysing the interference that people create between any two Wi-Fi points, such as between a home router and a smart speaker.
At CES, it demonstrated technology that can detect when a householder has fallen down, and then automatically switches to breath detection mode the moment it detects a fall, all through Wi-Fi.
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The Y2K bug is back, causing headaches for developers again
Twenty years ago, some developers dealt with the millennium bug by postponing it until... now.
Twenty years ago, as the world celebrated the start of a new millennium, IT professionals across the globe were getting cold sweats at the prospect of the Y2K bug kicking in: the fear that important systems relying on two-digit date logs would come to a standstill if computers interpreted the 1 January 2000, registered as 01/01/00, as the first day of the year 1900. No major incident happened, because developers had seen Y2K coming and prepared well. But two decades later, it has become apparent that some resorted to a quicker fix than others, and simply postponed the problem to 2020.
A series of incidents seem to have confirmed that Y2020 is tech's latest unwelcome blast from the past.
Parking meters across New York, for example, declined credit card payments after an outdated software took the payment option offline in the New Year. The Department of Transportation is still going through the city to manually update the 14,000 parking meters one by one and dubbed the problem a "Y2K2X software glitch".
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The awkward secret that prompted Nuheara's new earbuds sales model
Jan 6, 2020 — 1.32pm
Smart earphone maker Nuheara has made another shift in its evolving sales strategy, now targeting direct-to-consumer sales, after realising that consumers were hesitant to have their hearing tested in public.Speaking to The Australian Financial Review from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nuheara chief executive Justin Miller said its target market – people with mild to moderate hearing impairments – had demonstrated that they preferred to undertake a hearing test online than in a retail shop.
"The majority of our sales are now direct-to-consumer," he said.
"Relying on foot traffic into a store and conducting a hearing test in public wasn't the right environment because people were uncomfortable about acknowledging their hearing loss. What we've seen is they prefer to go online and do the test themselves, and that's been a major learning for us.
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Healthcare and industrial IoT to help drive 11m Australian Internet of Things connections by 2024
GlobalData expects Australian IoT and M2M penetration will almost double in the next four years
Senior Journalist, Computerworld | 10 January 2020 17:17 AEDT
Applications including smart healthcare, industrial IoT, smart homes, smart cities, autonomous vehicles and AR/VR will boost the number of Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections in Australia to 11.1 million by the end of 2024, according to a recent research by GlobalData.GlobalData forecasts M2M/IoT revenues in Australia will rise from $141 million in 2018 to $250 million by 2024.
Antariksh Raut, senior analyst of telecoms market data and intelligence at GlobalData, said IoT will “revolutionise” the future of the information communication sector by establishing seamless communication between machines and consumers.
“5G will emerge as the backbone of IoT ecosystem due to its massive speed, responsiveness and energy efficiency. Australian mobile network operators [MNOs] have already got their 5G spectrum in place and 5G connectivity will soon be a reality for consumers.”,” the analyst said.
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Telcos, NBN Co work to reconnect bushfire-ravaged communities
Australia’s major telcos are dealing with fire-damaged infrastructure and power outages
Editor, Computerworld | 9 January 2020 17:31 AEDT
Telstra, Optus and NBN Co are working to fix damaged infrastructure and reconnect communities in the wake of devastating bushfires that have affected services in New South Wales and Victorian communities.Telstra has suffered critical damage to a range of infrastructure including mobile base stations and exchanges, although interruptions to mains power has been responsible for the largest portion of service outages.
Telstra has been working alongside emergency services, the Country Fire Authority, the Rural Fire Service and the recently deployed Australian Defence Force (ADF) to assess and mitigate damage to telecommunications infrastructure.
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NBN Co upgrades small portion of slow FTTN services to full fibre
Where the other underperforming services will move is unclear.
NBN Co has upgraded 3000 premises originally assigned fibre-to-the-node technology to full fibre in order for them to meet the minimum speeds set out in the government’s statement of expectations.The number was revealed just before Christmas in response to a question by Labor Senator Anne Urquhart on the number of premises where NBN Co has “overbuilt FTTN with FTTP.”
“Approximately 3000 premises have had an infrastructure change and are now operational on FTTP,” NBN Co said in response.
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Vodafone claims all NBN services are uncommercial
Some connections can't subsidise others, and broadband tax won't fix it.
Vodafone Australia claims high-value NBN connections are in no way profitable enough to cross-subsidise “uncommercial” parts of the rollout, and that a proposed broadband tax won’t address the issue.The claims are contained in what is billed as a “hypothetical story” [pdf] created by the Centre for International Economics (CIE) at Vodafone’s behest, which traces the roadblocks a new telco operator would encounter setting up shop in regional Australia.
However, the "story" is also bookended with analysis that Vodafone is hoping will convince the government to abandon its latest attempt at introducing a broadband tax to cover part of the future cost of NBN upgrades in regional and remote Australia.
The broadband tax - officially called the regional broadband scheme (RBS) - has a chequered history, languishing before parliament for years, unable to muster the requisite support.
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NBN Co technicians outright missed 350 appointments a day in FY19
Under new definition of what constitutes a miss.
NBN Co’s field technicians outright missed 127,746 appointments in the last financial year, about 30 a day more than previously modelled.The network builder provided an updated number in response to a question raised by Labor Senator Anne Urquhart at the most recent Senate Estimates. [pdf]
The updated number is somewhat tricky to decipher since it relies on a revised definition of what NBN Co now considers to be a missed appointment.
NBN Co informally redefined the metric back in April last year, when it split the total number of missed appointments into two categories: the number of appointments fulfilled the same day - just outside the scheduled window, and the number of appointments that were missed outright and rescheduled for another day.
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NBN Co deploys satellite services to bushfire evacuation centres
As Telstra opens payphone network nationally.
NBN Co is expecting to have satellite-powered free wifi services available at 17 bushfire evacuation centres in NSW and Victoria later today.The network builder has also sent at least one of its Road Muster trucks to sites where it has been unable to install satellite equipment.
“We have now installed Sky Muster satellite dishes at 12 evacuation centres in NSW and VIC which are currently offering free wifi,” NBN Co said in a Facebook post.
“Additional services will be installed at five new locations [Monday].”
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Enjoy!
David.
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