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
A very quiet news week indeed. Just the continuing theme of the build-up to the election in September with input from all sorts of stakeholders.
It was very interesting that Kos Sclavos mentioned in his article that Deloittes is undertaking a review of the National E-Health Strategy. Wonder what that actually means? Given how much attention was paid to the last effort one does wonder.
My weekly review of my NEHRS showed it running like a dead duck. Just awfully slow and still way to hard to access.
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E-health is one key health policy area that is likely to take a significantly different path depending on who wins the federal election.
We know the Labor vision because they are in government and the Department of Health and Ageing is implementing their vision.
However, Dr Andrew Southcott, the opposition e-health spokesperson, has made it very clear that if the coalition wins the election a very different path will be taken.
The Guild has used e-health to accentuate the value add that community pharmacy can provide the health sector and our patients. E-Health will embed the role of the pharmacist in the health system.
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25th Feb 2013
MEDICARE Locals have been highlighted by Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton as a key area of wasteful spending in the health sector that could face cuts under a coalition government.
Mr Dutton said the Labor government has established 12 new bureaucracies without improving health services.
"There is a lot of waste in the new bureaucracies that have been created," Mr Dutton told Sky television on Sunday.
"I will put money back into frontline health services, particularly around mental health."
The new bureaucracies included Medicare Locals, which duplicated the federal health bureaucracy across Australia, and new health funding authorities, Mr Dutton said.
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Date February 27, 2013
Fleta Page
Reporter at The Canberra Times
A glitch in Canberra Hospital's IT system has forced their emergency department to direct patients with "non-urgent" issues elsewhere.
"Patients who present to the Canberra Hospital Emergency Department who do not require urgent treatment should expect delays," Canberra Hospital and Health Services Deputy Director‐General Ian Thompson said.
"Work is currently under way to resolve these issues, but it is not clear when the work will be complete.
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ATM ID DoHA/220/1213
Agency Department of Health and Ageing
Category 80101507 - Information technology consultation services
Close Date & Time 3-Apr-2013 2:00 pm (ACT Local time)
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Date February 27, 2013
Larissa Nicholson
DEPRESSION sufferers may soon be monitoring the severity of their condition via smartphones and tablets using Australian-developed voice and facial recognition technology.
Researchers say the computer program, created in partnership with the mood disorder treatment and prevention organisation the Black Dog Institute, has brought them closer to an objective indicator of melancholic, or biologically determined, depression.
The University of Canberra's Dr Roland Goecke, an expert in human-computer interaction, worked with the institute to develop the program, which measures the indicators of melancholic depression including a lack of facial movement, slow speech and avoiding eye contact.
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1st Mar 2013
AN AUSTRALIAN-developed online mood disorders diagnostic tool can elicit vital information from patients and encourage disclosure of symptoms, according to analysis of data from 16,000 users.
An audit of reports generated by the Mood Assessment Program (MAP), introduced by the Black Dog Institute in 2007, shows 85% of patients who completed the online questionnaire have significantly depressed mood.
The tool includes questions about life stressors, previous treatments and personality.
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Posted Wed, 27/02/2013 - 13:16 by Fran Molloy
NEHTA this week released their latest Healthcare Product Purchaser’s intention statement, a report giving a snapshot of the adoption of electronic procurement processes by health authorities and private healthcare providers around the country.
The report shows that from the June 2013, most health tenders will now include the requirement that suppliers have all of their products loaded into the National Product Catalogue (NPC) and can operate with that system, so that eProcurement can go ahead.
Mark Brommeyer is NEHTA’s Manager Supply Chain and says that the intention statement was developed following a survey conducted in 2011.
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Posted Mon, 25/02/2013 - 14:10 by Fran Molloy
It’s been a monumental few years for Libby Owen-Jones, who is the Clinical Systems Project Director at Austin Health, one of two public hospitals selected by Victoria’s Department of Health to trial a phased roll-out of eHealth services.
“It’s been a huge challenge, implementing such a massive, transformative change into a health system when hospitals have traditionally been run on paper,” Ms Owen-Jones says.
Since the project went live in June 2011, all radiology orders are fully electronic (end to end), and 95 per cent of pathology orders and discharge medication orders were completed electronically.
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Placing the consumer at the centre of a consolidated health data repository may not be the right approach
The concept of a Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) might be the correct political tactic to address ethical concerns around the confidentiality, consent and involvement of healthcare providers in accessing electronic health records.
But the decision to place the consumer at the centre of this national health information repository may not prove to be the right approach.
Last month, it was reported that the Federal government’s PCEHR initiative, developed by Australia’s National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA),
had failed to reach the expected uptake of 500,000 consumers in the first year.
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Summary: IBM claims its unified communications offerings can save time looking for others and responding to calls in a clinical environment. If its claims are true, that might mean two more hours per day for patient care.
One of the challenges of being a floor nurse is the running around, trying to find people. A hospital is a big facility, and even though the reporting and management structure is defined in such a way to operate in smaller floors or wards, there's still a tremendous amount of time spent by all of us, chasing down all the rest of us.
For example, if a tech needs to find me when I'm in a patient's room, he might have a rough idea of where I am, but he also might have to pop from room to room to find me. Pagers have had their uses, smartphones have been tried, and some of us even have to wear Star Trek-type commbadges around our necks all day. But there are few centralized systems that really deal with the problem systematically.
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Private health insurance company to deploy HP BSM software.
Medibank plans to deploy software to better measure performance of its online member services platform and smartphone app, HP announced today.
Medibank will deploy HP business service management software to monitor IT infrastructure and identify areas that may be causing delays for online and mobile customers, HP said.
HP didn’t disclose the terms of the contract.
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Published 8:03 AM, 27 Feb 2013
We’re going to have to wait seven months for a sensible discussion about technical options for the NBN – it’s pointless trying before the election – but there are other options, and they need to be discussed.
Last Friday NBN chief Mike Quigley had a go at encouraging an “open and transparent debate on the future options for Australia’s NBN”, which Opposition spokesman Malcolm Turnbull promptly labelled “bizarre” and the Minister Stephen Conroy carefully ignored.
The industry body, the Communications Alliance, which Quigley was trying to get to lead the debate, kind of shrugged its shoulders and mumbled something about it being an election year.
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THE billionaire co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin, believes the data storage potential of the social networking site can be used to revolutionise the global education and healthcare industries, putting people at the centre of innovation.
In a rare wide-ranging interview at The Wall Street Journal's inaugural Unleashing Innovation conference in Singapore, Mr Saverin also said he was now focused on backing internet start-ups that "reduced consumer friction" in what he termed "the transactional economy", making it easier for people to make purchases on mobile devices.
Mr Saverin, whose net worth is said to be about $US2.2 billion ($2.13bn) and who has lived in Singapore since 2009, has invested in a start-up company called Jumio.
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27th Feb 2013
CONFIDENTIAL consults with adolescents are viewed with concern by many parents, particularly those with a poor opinion of the medical profession, an Australian study suggests.
In-depth interviews with parents show their attitude to confidential consults stemmed from the level of trust they held in the GP, or in health professionals generally, and from how they saw their own responsibility as a parent.
“It wasn’t the doctor that gave birth to those kids and should have the responsibility for those decisions,” was how one mother put it.
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Published 7:04 AM, 25 Feb 2013
It seems that China’s 'Unit 61398' hasn’t yet got round to hacking any Australian companies’ computer systems, but chief executives and company directors in this country shouldn’t get too cocky: it may only be a matter of time, if it hasn’t happened already.
The United States is now engaged in virtually all-out cyber warfare against Iran, Russia and China, with much of the effort focusing on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But revelations in the past week have highlighted the big investment China has been making in industrial cyber espionage since 2006.
Internet security firm Mandiant published a 76-page report last week detailing the work of what it calls Advanced Persistent Threat No.1 (APT1) or Unit 61398, based in the Pudong New Area of Shanghai.
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Date February 25, 2013
Senior writer
The public service is revolting against reforms brought in by the federal government to make it easier and cheaper for people to use freedom-of-information laws.
Nearly all public service departments have made a submission to a review of the laws saying the changes have created more work than they can handle and question whether the changes are delivering ''value for money'' for the government.
''The first word that comes to mind is blowback,'' lawyer and FOI expert Peter Timmins said.
''The general thrust of most of them is to bring into question the reforms of 2010.''
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As everybody knows, the Start button is not included in Windows 8, and Microsoft has vowed not to put it back. If you’d rather not be forced to use the full-screen, tile-based UI, called Modern, here are five alternative programs that install on Windows 8.
As everybody knows, the Start button is not included in Windows 8, and Microsoft has vowed not to put it back. If you’d rather not be forced to use the full-screen, tile-based UI, called Modern, here are five alternative programs that install on Windows 8.
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Date February 28, 2013 - 9:47AM
Seth Borenstein
In less than five years, a married couple could be on their way to Mars in an audacious but bare-bones private mission that would slingshot them around the red planet.
The voyage to Mars and back would be a cosmic no-frills flight that would take the husband-and-wife astronauts as close as 161 kilometres to the planet, but it would also mean being cooped up for 16 months in a cramped space capsule half the size of a caravan.
The private, non-profit project, called Inspiration Mars, will get initial money from multimillionaire investment consultant Dennis Tito, the first space tourist. The team would not say how much the overall flight would cost, but outsiders put it at more than $US1 billion.
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Enjoy!
David.
