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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 any 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, and found interesting.
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https://www.innovationaus.com/wa-to-get-privacy-commissioner-data-breach-notice-scheme/
WA to get Privacy Commissioner, data breach notice scheme
Justin Hendry
Editor
15 December 2022
Western Australia will appoint its first-ever Privacy Commissioner and introduce a mandatory data breach notification scheme similar to that of New South Wales as part of proposed new public sector privacy laws.
Attorney General John Quigley and Innovation and Digital Economy minister Stephen Dawson committed to the “once-in-a-generation” privacy reforms on Wednesday, following three years of consultation on the long-awaited legislation.
It comes just weeks after calls to introduce privacy laws intensified in the wake of the Optus data breach and revelations that WA Police will retain data collected by the G2G Pass border management system for at least 25 years.
The proposed changes will bring Western Australia – one of only two remaining jurisdictions without dedicated privacy legislation, the other being South Australia – into line with other states and territories – and in some cases surpass them.
“The Western Australian public is keener than ever to see their personal information safely and responsibly. After consulting extensively, we are confident our privacy reforms will be at the forefront of privacy protections nationally,” Mr Quigley said.
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Tech giants told by Peter Dutton to cut off online evil
By Ellen Whinnett and Michael McKenna and Georgia Clelland
Peter Dutton has launched a scathing attack on social media companies, accusing them of abrogating their responsibilities in pursuit of profits, after the emergence of a chilling online video posted by the killers of two young constables and a neighbour in Monday’s ambush on a remote Queensland property.
A former Queensland police officer and long-time home affairs minister, the Opposition Leader said social media platforms used algorithms to promote conspiracy theories and make money but refused to tackle a proliferation of dangerous and hateful material.
Mr Dutton said he would work with the Albanese government on any plans it had to stem the flood of conspiracy theories, disinformation and hateful commentary online, such as that spread by Gareth and Stacey Train.
Just hours after the shooting, the couple boasted that they killed “these devils and demons” in a YouTube video that had followed a series of increasingly ominous online posts leading up to the attack at their property at Wieambilla, 290km west of Brisbane.
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Information Commissioner report on My Health Record and notifiable data breaches
Published 15 December 2022
Data for the January-June 2022 reporting period has been released by the OAIC.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) published its final privacy assessment report for 2022. The privacy assessment reports contain information about the obligations, compliance, and privacy risks of healthcare provider organisations relating to having a written policy (referred to as a Security and Access policy) under Rule 42 of the My Health Records Rule 2016.
The OAIC was notified of 396 data breaches from January to June 2022. The Privacy Act 1988 requires entities to take reasonable steps to conduct a data breach assessment within 30 days of becoming aware that there are grounds to suspect they may have experienced an eligible data breach. Once the entity forms a reasonable belief that there has been an eligible data breach, they must notify the OAIC and affected individuals as soon as practicable.
The OAIC Report can be viewed here: https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/notifiable-data-breaches/notifiable-data-breaches-statistics/notifiable-data-breaches-report-january-june-2022
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Synchron win: Gates, Bezos chip in for smart brains
By JARED LYNCH
12:56PM December 16, 2022
Bill Gates has returned to what he knows best, teaming up with Jeff Bezos to invest in developing computer chips for people’s brains.
After making billions of dollars from founding Microsoft in the 1970s, Mr Gates’ investments have been diverse in recent years – ranging from Waste Management and Ecolab to plant-based meat start-up Impossible Foods.
Now he is backing Australian biotech Synchron to accelerate the development of its brain computer interface to treat those with paralysis.
The human brain has become the next frontier for tech billionaires, with Elon Musk announcing earlier this month that his neuroscience start-up Neuralink will test its brain-reading “threads” on humans within six months.
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Privacy warning on TikTok threat
By SARAH ISON
8:12PM December 15, 2022
Australia needs to reform its privacy laws to manage the risk of Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok, the head of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security says, although he has stopped short of calling for a ban similar to that before the US congress.
Peter Khalil’s comments followed Republican and Democrat members of congress endorsing a new bill this week that would prevent Americans from accessing social media companies controlled or influenced by China or Russia, while states such as Alabama and Utah banned TikTok from state government devices.
Australian MPs were warned earlier this year by the Australian Signals Directorate not to download apps that harvested excessive amounts of data, such as TikTok, on their work phones.
Mr Khalil said he had serious concerns about TikTok and Australians needed to be fully informed about the dangers of the app. “We need to strike the right balance between protecting the rights of the individual to make their own decisions and implementing safeguards to protect the community and their data from foreign interference,” he told The Australian.
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Google’s abortion ad ban 'restricting abortion access'
By Joanna Panagopoulos
Reporter
December 15, 2022
Google is under pressure to reverse a "blanket ban" on medical abortion ads across Australia which are "restricting abortion access", according to the only national accredited abortion provider.
MSI Australia (formerly Marie Stopes) said all their abortion campaigns were banned from December 3 and despite multiple appeals to the Google Support team and the Government Affairs and Public Policy team since then, the ads have not been reinstated.
The non-profit said on multiple occasions they received a generic response from the support team that abortion was banned in Australia even though it isn't.
MSI Australia Managing Director Jamal Hakim said they believed Google had misinterpreted Australian law and regulations with its ban.
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Internet ‘turbocharging’ extremism and conspiracy theories: home affairs minister
By Matthew Knott and Angus Thompson
Updated December 15, 2022 — 5.41pmfirst published at 1.57pm
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil says intelligence agencies are investigating the national security implications of the Queensland shootout that led to the death of six people, including the role online radicalisation may have played in sparking the tragedy.
O’Neil said conspiracy theories, disinformation and misinformation were being “turbocharged” by the internet, presenting a new kind of national security threat for law enforcement agencies and policymakers.
New policy responses, including legislation, may be needed to help prevent people with extremist views from turning to violence, O’Neil said.
While Queensland Police are still investigating the case, O’Neil said online radicalisation was likely to form part of the explanation for why police officers were fired upon when they approached a property at Wieambilla, near Brisbane.
Online accounts sharing the name of one member of the now deceased trio inside the home, 47-year-old Gareth Train, had been active on conspiracy websites for years and suggested an interest in the topics for decades.
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It’s high time we legislated governing principles for the digital age
It is important that Australia passes relevant laws in 2023 so consumers here can enjoy many of the benefits overseas citizens already have.
Rod Sims Former ACCC chair
Dec 15, 2022 – 1.46pm
We are now in the midst of the digital age. We are rightly dazzled by what search, apps and social media can deliver; services unimaginable not so long ago. But we are only slowly realising that the many associated harms can and should be dealt with, as they are in more mature markets.
The recently released fifth interim report of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platform services inquiry exposes the consumer and competition harms clearly and, most importantly, explains how to address them.
The consumer harms are a significant and sustained increase in scams, harmful and sometimes fraudulent apps, fake reviews that harm consumers and businesses, and choice architecture that aims to exploit consumer behavioural biases.
The old “buyer beware” approach simply cannot work; consumers can only avoid potholes if they can see them. The competition harms may be less obvious but can be equally damaging.
The digital company winners are, understandably, now more focused on protecting their dominant positions, which damages choice and innovation – the two essential ingredients of a successful market economy. And they have unprecedented scope to do this through anticompetitive self-preferencing and tying, exclusivity agreements, impeding switching and interoperability, withholding access to important hardware, software and data inputs, and buying up all likely competitors at an early stage.
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https://wildhealth.net.au/digital-health-not-just-a-cost-to-be-recouped/
15 December 2022
Digital health not just a cost to be recouped
Spending in healthcare is a tricky line to straddle. When lives and health are at stake, justifying funnelling money into one area over another can be a minefield.
And when it comes to digital health, decision makers have traditionally viewed it as a cost that needs to be recouped, according to a perspective paper published in the MJA this week.
But, the authors argue, this is a short-sighted and incomplete way to understand the value of digital health.
“Recouping the costs from an information technology investment in the short to medium term is unlikely due to the large upfront expense and the limited efficiencies that can be delivered in the short term,” the authors wrote.
The paper calls for a shift away from the business case model of evaluating the value of digital health, as the benefits of digital health far exceed financial recoupment.
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https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=a9203caa-1484-40ad-9f38-dbbf189772f5
Australia’s Artificial Intelligence Ethics Framework: Making Australia a global leader in responsible and inclusive AI
Nyman Gibson Miralis Dennis Miralis
Australia December 8 2022
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a part of our daily lives, from organising our schedules using voice assistance to taking recommendations on the movies we should watch. It can also predict and prevent the spread of bushfires.
Given our increasing reliance on AI, it is important to ensure that AI is safe, secure and reliable. The Australian Government’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ethics Framework outlines eight principles that will guide businesses and governments to responsibly design, develop and implement AI, to ensure that Australia becomes a global leader in responsible and inclusive AI.
Australia’s AI Ethics Principles
Australia’s eight AI Ethics Principles will help:
- Achieve safer, more reliable and fairer outcomes for all Australians.
- Reduce the risk of negative impact on those affected by AI applications.
- Businesses and governments to practice the highest ethical standards when designing, developing and implementing AI.
The voluntary principles that are recommended to be followed throughout the AI lifecycle are outlined below.
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Tuesday, 13 December 2022 10:54
Australia now leads the world in data breaches following Medibank breach
Australia now has the highest data breach density in the world, with breaches spiking by 489% this quarter (and it's not over yet). Globally, data breaches have decreased by 70.8% while Australian breaches have surged by 1,550%. In fact, Australia's data breach density is 24 times higher than the global average.
Australia, the lucky country, is decidedly unlucky with a series of data breaches - of which Medibank is the most notable, now making us the data breach capital of the world.
Surfshark is a privacy protection toolset developed to help its users control their online presence seamlessly. Its data breach monitoring research now finds an average of 22 Australian accounts are breached every minute this quarter. That is the highest quarterly spike this decade, coming from two breaches per minute last quarter. It's an increase of 489% and reflects 1.88 million Australian user profiles stolen already this quarter, up from 300,000 last quarter.
“Globally, data breaches have gone down by 70.8% from October to November. In Australia, however, data breaches have surged by 1550% - from 107,659 in October to 1,776,065 in November. This is largely due to the Medibank cyber attack, which resulted in 1.75 million breached email accounts.” - says Surfshark lead researcher Agneska Sablovskaja.
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Show me the money: how do we justify spending health care dollars on digital health?
Leanna Woods, Rebekah Eden, Oliver J Canfell, Kim‐Huong Nguyen, Tracy Comans and Clair Sullivan
Med J Aust ||
doi: 10.5694/mja2.51799
Published online: 12 December 2022
Focusing solely on financial measures is unlikely to deliver a comprehensive view of the value of digital health
Digital health, which refers to the use of digital technology to provide and support health care services, promises to strengthen health systems worldwide and has been accelerated by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic.1 Amid the rapid digital transformation of health care,2,3 the value of sizeable digital health investments remains unclear.3,4 The investments required for digital health are often substantial and may come at a cost to existing health care delivery models. Decision makers can be paralysed by a situation where investment in digital health is unavoidable but the conventionally measured short term outcomes often do not provide a convincing fiscal return on investment.2,3
However, health systems are now shifting from perceiving digital health as a cost that needs to be recouped to a quality improvement tool that can positively transform health care. This is because large‐scale digital health implementations, such as electronic medical records (EMRs), provide significant quality and safety benefits, including:5
- reduced unwarranted variation in care;
- reduced preventable harm;
- improved patient centredness; and
- enhanced opportunities for monitoring, risk management, and quality improvement.
These quality and safety benefits, despite being significant and meaningful to clinicians and consumers, are difficult to cost, rarely deliver a rapid financial benefit to the funder, and are traditionally not measured in financial evaluations.
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Tuesday, 13 December 2022 00:54
Digital identity takes off as governments realise benefits, says GlobalData
Driven by vaccination certificates, the need for identity checks in financial services, and the potential of the metaverse, governments across the world realise the benefits and the importance of digital identity, enabling the technology to take off, according to data and analytics company GlobalData.
GlobalData’s latest report, ’Digital Identity’, reveals that the theme had previously been slow to take off, hampered by countries driving in different gears.
Digital identity is a collection of online information about a person, an organization, or a machine, which, when grouped together, can provide a digital representation of that entity.
David Bicknell, Principal Analyst, Thematic Intelligence team at GlobalData, comments: “Digital identity’s time is now. There are many possible use cases, from financial services to tracking and managing identities in the metaverse. COVID-19 has been an important driver. It took a global pandemic for governments to recognise that vaccination certificates on smartphones enabling foreign travel was the killer app that digital identity could deliver, and people could use, even if they might not recognize it as digital identity.”
GlobalData says China, which has the world’s most advanced social credit and surveillance systems, is a clear leader in digital identity. - and the Nordic countries and Estonia are well aware of the benefits of digital identities, as is India, with its Aadhaar ID system.
The EU wants to give its citizens digital identity credentials accessible from digital wallets, and Australia and New Zealand are moving towards legislation.The UK is implementing a ‘One Login’ program for citizens to access government services online, but the US lags behind, hampered by a patchwork of state initiatives but no federal conformity on digital identity,” notes GlobalData.
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How to protect yourself from hacks and scams in 2023
Finance expert
December 13, 2022 — 5.05am
Around half of Australians have had their personal information stolen in the past few months after being caught up in the high-profile cyber hacks of two of Australia’s biggest companies, Optus and Medibank.
If you’ve been a victim, what can you do to protect yourself against fraud and scams by people who now have your data – and prevent it happening again?
Choose your providers carefully: It’s easy to assume bigger businesses with more data are more likely to be targeted, but Nelson Yiannakou, head of financial crime at digital bank Revolut, doesn’t think it’s that simple. He says businesses large and small are targets, and it’s their commitment to security rather than their size that matters.
For starters, he says, “an organisation who takes cybersecurity seriously should be compliant with the primary standards ISO 27001 and ISO 27002 which establish the requirements and procedures for creating an information security management system”.
Use more than a password: Two-factor authentication is now widely recommended for all your accounts – even social media. It means you not only have to enter a password, but also a code sent to your device.
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https://apo.org.au/node/321062
A roadmap towards scalable value-based payments in Australian healthcare
6 Dec 2022
Publisher Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research
Health equity Health services accessibility Health services planning Government funding Health economics Patient safety Australia
Resources A roadmap towards scalable value-based payments in Australian healthcare 1.57 MB
Description
Australian healthcare funding policy needs a rethink. Over the last decade, governments have sought to give primary health networks (PHNs) and local health networks (LHNs) greater local planning and commissioning roles. Policy direction suggests PHNs and LHNs will also be tasked with developing outcomes-based funding models, premised on the suggestion that local level planning will deliver better outcomes.
Developing a value-based payment model is complex. PHNs and LHNs require the necessary skills and experience, policy levers, supporting infrastructure and workforce to appropriately implement a value-based payment model. Such a decentralised approach is unlikely to be efficient. Implementing a value-based payment model in isolation will lead to duplication and missed opportunities to share learnings and iteratively improve value-based payment models.
The likelihood of developing a program of successful, value-based payment models will be substantially greater if state, territory and federal governments develop a structured and supportive policy and institutional framework around the intent to trial and evaluate ongoing value-based payment models nationally. Four recommendations are made to establish this framework.
Australian healthcare policy has focused mostly on reorganising models of care. State, territory and federal governments have neglected to harness financial incentives to improve value. This has been, in part, a response to the unease many providers feel towards having their revenue streams reorganised, taking on increased financial risk, and experiencing increased costs as business and care models realign.
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Annual report of the Australian Information Commissioner’s activities in relation to digital health 2021–22
For the full report please Download the print version
Executive summary
This annual report sets out the Australian Information Commissioner’s (Information Commissioner) digital health compliance and enforcement activity during 2021–22, in accordance with s 106 of the My Health Records Act 2012 and s 30 of the Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010 (HI Act).
The report provides information about digital health activities led by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), including our assessment program, handling of My Health Record data breach notifications, development of guidance material, provision of advice and liaison with key stakeholders.
This was the 10th year of operation of the My Health Record system and the 12th year of the Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service), a critical enabler for the My Health Record system and digital health generally.
The management of personal information is at the core of both the My Health Record system and the HI Service (which are collectively referred to as ‘digital health’ in this report). In recognition of the special sensitivity of health information, the My Health Records Act and the HI Act contain provisions that protect and restrict the collection, use and disclosure of personal information. The Information Commissioner oversees compliance with those privacy provisions.
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David.
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