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This weekly blog is to explore the news around the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology, social media 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 were dated 6 December, 2018 and we have seen none since! It’s pretty sad!
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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https://the-riotact.com/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-incoming-digital-health-record/583949
Here's what you need to know about the incoming Digital Health Record
13 August 2022 | Lottie Twyford
In exactly three months’ time, a single patient records system will be rolled out across the Territory’s public health system.
When it does, it will replace a mishmash of more than 40 existing systems.
The move to the Digital Health Record is touted by the government to make life easier for patients and clinicians, although some challenges and additional work for staff are anticipated in the first instance.
What is the Digital Health Record?
Essentially, it’s a Territory-wide records system that will be used at public hospitals, walk-in centres, community health centres and justice health services.
It will also have a patient-facing application that healthcare consumers can download and use.
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https://www.innovationaus.com/a-simple-fix-for-our-broken-govt-tech-procurement/
A simple fix for our broken govt technology procurement
Catherine
Thompson
Contributor
9 August 2022
The Innovation Papers’ invitation to provide a visionary reimagining of government Information and Communications Technology (ICT) procurement should have filled my life with sunshine. So why the disconsolate mien of someone who has been handed a box of chocolates to find that only the strawberry crèmes remain on the top layer?
It is because I am staring at the strawberry crèmes of procurement, which have not been made any more palatable by years of being handed around. They are Transparency, Value, and Capability, and unless someone eats them up, we can’t in good conscience move on to the delights of Strategy and Purpose that might be found in the layer beneath.
This trio are foundational to our collective ability to engage in democratic practices of informed enquiry, to support public oversight and advocacy, and to turn government’s substantial ICT spending power to the advantage of its own economic base.
ICT procurement is not an intractable problem for government, even though inaction – and sometimes backsliding – on the findings of the 2017 ICT Procurement Taskforce (and its many and consistently worded predecessors) might lead to that conclusion.
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https://digitalhealth.org.au/blog/be-a-branch-leader/
Be a branch leader
Aug 8, 2022 | AIDH ACT, AIDH news, AIDH NSW, AIDH QLD, AIDH SA, AIDH VIC, AIDH WA, Community Chats, Community of Practice, Membership, Nominations, State branch
The Institute is calling for nominations from eligible members who would like to hold a leadership position within their local branch committee.
Being part of a Branch Committee is a great way to contribute to a community focused on building the digital health movement through networks, events and ideas exchange.
You will also be able to grow your professional knowledge, build on your leadership skills and further your network.
The Branch Charter for the Institute was written at the time of the merger with terms for each nominated Committee member to ensure we could retain the corporate knowledge of the committee each year to continue driving the strategy forward.
To be eligible to sit on an AIDH Branch Committee individuals must be:
- A financial Fellow or member (FAIDH, AFAIDH, Individual, Student, Nominee) of AIDH and resident in the geographical area of the Branch
- Committed to and engaged in the progression of the national digital health agenda
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https://digitalhealth.org.au/blog/you-are-a-digital-health-sme/
You are a digital health SME – get involved!
Aug 11, 2022 | Advocacy, Shifting the Dial
AIDH is calling for subject matter experts from across the Institute to share their knowledge, ideas and passion for the potential of digital to change the way we deliver healthcare forever.
As a subject matter expert, you will find more opportunities to have a voice in shaping the national policy agenda, programs of work and driving the AIDH vision “healthier lives, digitally enabled”.
Why now?
We’re changing the way we communicate our vision and advocate for digital health in Australia – and we want you to be part of the movement.
Every AIDH Fellow and member has a role to play in shifting the dial on Australia’s transition to a digital health future. Fellows and members of the Institute are recognised nationally and globally as leaders, and emerging leaders, in all fields of digital health and health informatics.
From our members on the frontline, to executives and leaders across all fields of healthcare, we have heard your collective voices and we know there is a strong desire to make a powerful difference to health and social care in Australia.
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https://digitalhealth.org.au/blog/its-time-to-shift-the-dial-on-digital-health/
It’s time to Shift the Dial on digital health
Aug 11, 2022 | Advocacy, Shifting the Dial
By Khaled Chakli
Director of Leadership & Policy
It is the right of every Australian to expect a consumer-centric, connected, and digitally capable healthcare system. Australia’s pandemic response proved that it’s possible.
Digital enablement could define twenty-first century healthcare.
For decades, there have been calls for the integration and use of technology in healthcare, its enablement, and its delivery.
Despite this, progress has been frustratingly slow.
Many may argue that this slow progress is a measure of the scale of the challenge – not the willingness or need in the community.
However, over the last 24 months, we’ve witnessed the expedited adoption and scaling of digital health solutions across the Australian healthcare landscape.
This willingness to propagate the pervasion of ICT throughout the healthcare system, and to digitally enable consumer centric-health services is proof that it can be done.
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Thursday, 11 August 2022 08:51
The rise of biometrics, and why is it safer than passwords, according to Ping Identity
Eighty-one percent of hacking-related breaches use stolen or weak passwords, according to American software company Ping Identity.
Due to the obvious flaws in the traditional ways of accessing devices and apps, Ping Identity has assessed the rise in biometric data use, questioning if it is really more secure, and the impact it will have on the way we store and use our personal data.
In the three years leading up to 2022, the number of Gen Zs who fell victim to online scams rose by 123%.
While this generation of digital natives is often perceived as the most tech savvy, digitally literate age group, the rise in Gen Z falling for online scammers is reflective of higher levels of comfort in online spaces, often leading to unforeseen financial and emotional harm as a result.
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Case Study: Royal Flying Doctors Service Queensland protects patient data
By Velvet-Belle Templeman on Aug 9, 2022 3:36PM
Royal Flying Doctors Service Queensland (RFDSQ) is working to protect its patient data from getting into the hands of bad actors, through securing data in an off-premises, air-gapped environment.
RFDSQ provides aromatic emergency services across 1.8 million square kilometres of territory. The organisation delivers more than 98,000 episodes of care to some of Australia’s most remote communities, transporting 11,700 patients, running over 5,300 health clinics and providing health advice to more than 16,000 telehealth patients.
Digital Nation Australia spoke to RFDSQ chief technology officer Adam Carey about the organisation’s 54 element cyber security roadmap.
“Our crown jewels is our patient data. The main reason for having such a strong IT team is really to ensure that the clinical systems we manage and maintain are secure, that they're protected at all times, but they're still available in the field when the clinicians need them,” said Carey.
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Tiny bed sensors could put an end to hospital pressure sores
Wednesday, 10 August, 2022
Tiny smart bed sensors embedded in hospital mattresses could help put an end to painful and potentially life-threatening pressure sores.
Scientists from the University of South Australia have designed minute optical fibre sensors that can be attached to the upper surface of a mattress to monitor movement and record heart and respiratory rates.
The unobtrusive sensors can detect when a hospital patient turns over, leaves a bed or just remains motionless, picking up their breathing.
Nurses can therefore be remotely alerted if a patient has not moved within a couple of hours, prompting them to adjust the patient’s position.
Lead researcher Dr Stephen Warren-Smith said the technology could “significantly relieve” the burden on hospital staff having to constantly monitor patients for pressure sores.
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St Vincent's digital solution to improve risk management
Wednesday, 10 August, 2022
St Vincent’s Health Australia’s Manager of Clinical Governance & Assurance, Edel Murray, reflects on the organisation’s new initiative to reduce risks and improve safety.
At St Vincent’s Health Australia (SVHA), we constantly strive for safer, more effective measures to reduce vulnerability and risks across the organisation. That’s why it was imperative that we empowered our staff to contribute to a broader risk management solution, creating safer environments for patients, clients, colleagues and residents.
RiskMan to the rescue
We had five distinctive, divisional applications to manage incidents, feedback, hazards, quality and risk, and our aim was to consolidate and standardise these into one enterprise digital solution. This was when ‘SVHA RiskMan’ was born. Supported by a robust governance methodology back in August 2020, the initiative was segmented into four distinct stages: Standardisation, Consolidation, Implementation and Transition to Business As Usual (BAU).
A key success factor for the project was stakeholder engagement. The project team led 13 working groups to map current and future state processes. Within these working groups, over 270 subject matter experts participated in virtual meetings, creating one dataset to meet best practice guidelines, legislative compliance and the needs of acute, sub-acute and aged care reporting. As the first SVHA enterprise-wide solution, many specialities were brought together, establishing a number of communities of practice.
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Australian organisations falling behind in implementing Zero Trust cybersecurity
August 10, 2022
Australian organisations are falling behind on best practice in cyber security, with almost half of those surveyed in a new report yet to implement leading verification practices.
A report by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Datacom, found that 58 per cent of organisations were on their way to implementing “Zero Trust”; a strategic approach to cybersecurity that continuously validates every stage of a digital interaction.
And of those, 25 per cent had secured the funding needed to implement a Zero Trust program, which forces every person and device to be verified before getting access to any company networks or information.
Verification methods include codes being sent by SMS to an employee’s phone, which then need to be entered in before access is granted.
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https://www.itnews.com.au/news/australias-central-bank-launches-digital-currency-project-583748
Australia's central bank launches digital currency project
By Staff Writer on Aug 9, 2022 11:28AM
Kicks off a year of research.
Australia's central bank on Tuesday said it was launching a one-year research programme into the case for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Australia, focusing on what potential economic benefits it might bring.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is partnering with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), a government-backed industry group, in the program.
The project will seek to identify innovative use cases and business models that could be supported by the issuance of a CBDC, and better understand of some of its technological, legal and regulatory considerations.
It will involve the development of a limited-scale CBDC pilot that will operate in a ring-fenced environment and involve a pilot CBDC that is a real claim on the RBA.
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https://www.smh.com.au/technology/rba-to-trial-a-digital-currency-20220809-p5b8cp.html
Future of money: The RBA to trial a digital currency
August 9, 2022 — 9.59am
The Reserve Bank of Australia will trial a digital currency in a “ring-fenced” pilot program as part of a collaborative research project into how it could be used by consumers and businesses that is set to last about a year.
Australia’s central bank has previously declared its interest in digital currency, which could be a digital equivalent of the dollar and rival privately minted cryptocurrencies, but the research project announced by the bank on Tuesday with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre would focus on how such an asset could actually be used.
The research centre’s chief executive Andreas Furche, whose organisation is a product of industry, university and government collaboration, said it had already been proven that a central bank digital currency was technically feasible. “The key research questions now are what economic benefits a CBDC (central bank digital currency) could enable, and how it could be designed to maximise those benefits,” Furche said.
In a media release, the Reserve Bank said previous research from central banks around the world had gone into questions such as how the distributed ledger technology that is a hallmark of cryptocurrencies could be used for an RBA-backed currency.
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https://wildhealth.net.au/butler-patient-enrolment-is-on-its-way/
9 August 2022
Butler: Patient enrolment is on its way
By Holly Payne
Ready or not, voluntary patient enrolment is coming – that’s the message coming out of the AMA National Conference.
It will either be the biggest administrative headache of a GP’s career, or the data source that finally proves the profession’s worth to the powers that be.
Health Minister Mark Butler told delegates at the AMA conference over the weekend that his “two real priorities” for the next four years were fixing primary care and fixing aged care.
“The most terrifying statistic in health, which is an area replete with terrifying statistics, is that less than 15% of medical graduates are choosing general practice as their career,” Mr Butler said.
The Strengthening Medicare Taskforce, which had its first meeting on Friday, is set to come up with implementation and funding recommendations for major elements of the abandoned Primary Health Care 10 Year Plan before the year is out.
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https://wildhealth.net.au/covid-predictions-blocked-by-poor-interoperability/
9 August 2022
Covid predictions blocked by poor interoperability
By Wendy John
Machine learning at the CSIRO has automated a faster way to spot emerging covid variants.
The powerful tool, however, is stymied by a lack of interoperability that would link genome data back to patient outcomes.
The new tool, VariantSpark, analyses the RNA of the whole variant, rather than the current method of monitoring changes to just the spike protein. CSIRO scientist Associate Professor Denis Bauer said this means it can account for small changes.
“On their own these changes may not seem significant but when combined with other small changes can influence the way the virus behaves. Our approach was able to identify variants that could be monitored a week before they were flagged by health organisations – and a week is a long time when you’re trying to outsmart a pandemic,” Professor Bauer said.
The tool was programmed to provide hourly updates which could enable rapid information sharing with public health decision makers to prepare hospitals for increases in demand. However, a lack of interoperability is a major barrier.
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https://wildhealth.net.au/gps-still-struggling-to-get-their-heads-in-the-cloud/
9 August 2022
GPs still struggling to get their heads in the cloud
The push to get GPs and clinicians on to the cloud neglects the immense challenges many are facing just trying to get through the day, said a panel of experts at the Inaugural Australasian CXO Cloud Healthcare Summit in May.
The panellists were discussing the topic models of care in the cloud: hospital in the home, aged care, between the hospital and the GP. They said that GPs are struggling to migrate to the cloud due to ever-growing pressure on the state healthcare system and a critical lack of staff caused by the pandemic.
Addressing these barriers will be key to fostering stronger engagement between general practitioners, PHNs, and the hospital sector.
Despite the difficulties covid has caused in the healthcare system, it has also highlighted the need for a more holistic approach to clinical care, said Dr Amith Shetty, Clinical Director of Patient Experience and System Performance at NSW Ministry of Health.
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Why this Aussie software firm is going public in the middle of a tech wreck
John Davidson Columnist
Aug 8, 2022 – 11.23am
The tech downturn hasn’t scared everyone off listing on the stock market. Bridge SaaS, a Sydney-based software-as-a-service company, says it will open an initial public offering (IPO) on Tuesday, hoping to raise $4.5 million to fund its push into the ever-growing National Disability Insurance Scheme.
And it has brought on the former head of the National Disability Insurance Agency, Martin Hoffman, to help its move into the NDIS, too.
Bridge makes a client management platform for businesses that supply employment and, increasingly, disability services.
Chief executive Jamie Conyngham said the company was pressing ahead with its IPO, despite the widespread devaluation of technology stocks, because it had already given itself a modest valuation when it embarked on the IPO process a year ago, and the downturn had not forced the company to lower that valuation any further.
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ATO gets more time to deliver single business register amid $1bn blowout
By Justin Hendry on Aug 8, 2022 12:25PM
Full transfer of functions now not expected before 2026.
The Australian Taxation Office has been given another four years to complete the country’s business register overhaul after it emerged the project will cost the government $1 billion more than first anticipated.
Late last month, assistant treasurer and financial services minister Stephen Jones accused the former government of hiding the significant cost overrun in the modernising business registers (MBR) program, which is now expected to come in at $1.5 billion.
The project, which is replacing the 30-year-old Australian Business Register and 31 other registers with a single platform operated by a new one-stop service called Australian Business Registry Services, has been underway for the past three years.
It was initially funded to the tune of $19.3 million in the 2018-19 budget, with additional funding injections of $60.6 million and $419.9 million provided in 2019-20 and 2020-21, bringing the total current budget to around $500 million.
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AI in health — can we program human dignity?
Friday, 05 August, 2022
A new survey designed to understand the role of dignity in machine-assisted medical treatment has brought the thorny issue of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into human health care back into the spotlight.
Many clinical settings already use different applications of AI to analyse test results, speed up diagnoses and even guide treatment decisions — but not everyone is comfortable with outsourcing decisions about their health care to a machine.
“We need to think more deeply about the impact on people and about the way they feel about AI making various decisions about their health,” said Associate Professor Paul Formosa, a philosophy and ethics scholar at Macquarie University. Formosa is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE).
If having AI involved in their health care makes people feel dehumanised, patients may struggle to accept its decisions or recommendations, no matter how accurate, or efficient, Formosa said.
“Image recognition is something AI is very good at — and there’s examples where AI trained on hundreds and thousands of images of eye retinas, for example, can perform as well or even better than humans in detecting certain diseases,” he said.
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David.
1 comment:
What is the Digital Health Record?
Essentially, it’s a Territory-wide records system that will be used at public hospitals, walk-in centres, community health centres and justice health services.
So, no GP data, specialist data, private hospital data.
What they really need is a system that reduces data fragmentation and works across all healthcare databases.
Why hasn't someone though of that by now?
Oh, that's right, that's what the PCEHR was supposed to be. No wonder they renamed it, it's a pathetic shadow of what was intended. All for $3billion and 10 years.
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