Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Monday, May 21, 2018

Weekly Australian Health IT Links – 21st May, 2018.Weekly Australian Health IT Links – 21st May, 2018.

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

This week will be the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning for the myHR. It’s now all happening!
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‘This is a Government with a woeful track record on IT security and privacy.’

Catherine King has challenged the Turnbull Government on whether it can roll out the My Health Record system without getting it wrong

It’s been heralded as a “game changer” by the PSA’s Shane Jackson and “strategically very valuable” for pharmacy by the Guild’s David Quilty… but the Shadow Minister for Health and Medicare has suggested that the Government may not be able to implement the system with effective privacy controls in place.
This week the Health Minister, Greg Hunt, announced that Australians who want to opt out of having a My Health Record can do so between 16 July and 15 October 2018.
Ms King says that Labor supports e-health: “Implemented by a competent Government, e-health could deliver tangible health care improvements and save the health system up to $7 billion a year through fewer diagnosis, treatment and prescriptions errors,” she said.
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My Health opt-out choice coming soon for medical details

  • The Australian
  • 1:00AM May 19, 2018

Sean Parnell

One of Australia’s most significant yet controversial healthcare reforms, the introduction of an electronic record, is entering a new phase, with consumers set to be given the chance to opt out of the scheme.
The Australian Digital Health Agency has determined the three-month opt-out period for the My Health Record — formerly known as the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record — will run from July 16 to ­October 15. Unless an individual chooses not to have a record and makes it known in that period, they will be given one.
About 5.7 million Australians already have a My Health Record but a decision by health ministers in August last year to make the system opt-out rather than opt-in means the next phase of the expansion will be crucial. Governments have spent more than $1 billion on the project, which promises centrally stored and accessible health records to not only facilitate an ­individual’s treatment but better support healthcare providers and, across the longer term, improve the system itself.
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The latest health data breach is one reason why I’ll be opting out of MyHealthRecord

  • Written by Robert Merkel, Lecturer in Software Engineering, Monash University
Hackers exploited a weakness in the web-based booking system of Family Planning NSW to infect the system with ransomware.
Family Planning NSW has taken its website offline for a “security update” after learning that hackers breached its booking system two weeks ago. The organisation notified its clients via email, and journalist Lauren Ingram, who was personally affected by the data breach, shared the notification on Twitter.
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Govt reveals My Health Record opt out window

By Justin Hendry on May 14, 2018 5:21PM

Australians to be given three months.

The federal government has finally unveiled the period in which Australians will be able opt out of having a personal electronic health record created under the country's My Health Record scheme.
Minister for Health Greg Hunt announced the dates for the three-month window this afternoon following months of speculation about the date.
Individuals will be able to opt out between July 16 and October 15 this year, after which time a record will be automatically created for every Australian.
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My Health Record opt-out period from July 16 to October 15, 2018

The window for Australians to opt out of an electronic health record has been announced by the government.
By Chris Duckett | May 14, 2018 -- 07:39 GMT (17:39 AEST) | Topic: Security
Australians will have from July 16 to October 15, 2018, to opt out of having an electronic health record.
Those choosing not to have a My Health Record can opt out at the My Health Record website or by calling 1800 723 471. So far, 5.7 million people are in the system.
"The protection of patient information is critical, and the My Health Record system has strong safeguards in place to protect the health data. It is also subject to some of the strongest legislation in the world to prevent unauthorised use," the Australian Digital Health Agency said in a blog post.
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Media release - My Health Record opt out date announced

14 May 2018
More than five million Australians already have a My Health Record, which provides a summary of their key health information, delivering better health outcomes for patients and their treating doctors and specialists.
Every Australian will be offered a My Health Record unless they choose not to have one during the three month opt out period that will run from 16 July to 15 October 2018.
The My Health Record system and opt out process has the full support of all state and territory governments, who unanimously agreed to this plan in August 2017 at COAG Health Council.
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Opt-out period for My Health Records announced

By Kate Aubusson
14 May 2018 — 6:02pm
Australians who don't want a personal electronic health record will have from July 16 to October 15 to opt-out of the national scheme the federal government announced on Monday.
Every Australian will have a My Health Record unless they choose to opt-out during the three-month period, according to the Australian Digital Health Agency.
The announcement follows the release of the government’s secondary use of data rules earlier this month that inflamed concerns of patient privacy.
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Data privacy expert recommends opting out of proposed e-health scheme

By Eleanor Hall, David Lewis on The World Today
The Federal Government is pushing ahead with its plans to create an electronic health record for every Australian.
Personal patient details will be stored on a national database that doctors around the country can see.
You do have three months from July to opt out of the scheme, but after that your records will stay in the My Health system forever.
Dr Katherine Kemp, a specialist in data privacy at the University of New South Wales, says the system could lead to greater convenience and consistency, but that she would advise opting out of it as it stands.
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MHR a ‘game changer’ for pharmacist participation

The Government has announced that the opt-out period for My Health Record will run from 16 July until 15 October 2018

And stakeholders including the PSA and Pharmacy Guild say participation in the system is likely to change how pharmacists are viewed by other health professionals.
Currently around 5.7 million Australians already have a My Health Record, which will provide a summary of their health information. The system has the support of a number of health stakeholders, including the Pharmacy Guild and PSA.
As well as having the ability to opt out of the system during the July-October period, patients can also cancel their My Health Record at any time after the end of the opt-out period – or they can decide to create one later if they opted out.
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Opt-out harder for older patients

Young residents will have until October to opt-out if they do not want their medical records stored online for third party organisations to potentially view.
The federal government has announced patients will be able to remove their digitised records from the My Health Record website between July 16 and October 15.
The online service is intended to provide Australians with easy access to medical history. It has the potential to provide uniformed healthcare across multiple clinicians.
Contentiously, the records may also be given to third parties, including commercial organisations, if they can prove to be using the information in the public interest. It is yet unclear what constitutes the public interest.
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SA pathology test results delayed by IT system

By Justin Hendry on May 17, 2018 10:28AM

New staff brought in to clear data backlog.

SA Health has blamed the "data entry requirements" of a new state-wide pathology system for delays in getting blood test results to patients.
Deputy chief executive Don Frater said that "complex initial data-entry requirements” for the enterprise pathology laboratory information system (EPLIS) meant extended wait times for results.
The department said it had brought in 30 staff to try to clear the backlog.
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SA Health launches taskforce after claims of lost and delayed pathology results caused by new IT system

Lynne Minion | 16 May 2018
Following reports of delays in pathology testing times and lost test results since the introduction of its EPLIS pathology IT system, SA Health has employed 30 extra staff and announced a new taskforce to help fix the problems.
SA Health deputy chief executive Don Frater said the roll out of the new statewide pathology laboratory information system had led to an increase in test turnaround times due to complex initial data-entry requirements.
“Since the introduction of EPLIS we have seen the wait times for some laboratory test results increase for hospitals and GPs,” Frater said.
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Paperless scripts surprise

Government needs to spell out the detail around Budget e-script announcement, Guild says

Pharmacy stakeholders are as yet unaware of concrete plans to help the sector be ready for the government’s October 2019 deadline for electronic prescribing.
Last week’s Federal Budget announced $28.2 million was to be dedicated over five years from 2017-18 to upgrade the e-prescribing software system used by clinicians.
“This measure supports a national electronic prescribing system that will contribute to PBS efficiency, compliance, drug safety and data collection,” Treasurer Scott Morrison said.
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Cyber attack on Family Planning NSW client database

By Kate Aubusson
14 May 2018 — 11:30am
A cyber attack on Family Planning NSW has potentially exposed the personal information of clients, including women who have booked appointments or sought advice about abortion, contraception and other services over the past 2½ years.
Clients received an email from the organisation alerting them that their website had been hacked over two weeks ago, which may have compromised its online data.
“These databases contained information from clients who had contacted Family Planning NSW through our website in the past 2½ years, seeking appointments or leaving feedback,” read the email signed by Chair of the FPNSW board Sue Carrick and chief executive Adjunct Professor Ann Brassil.
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Family Planning NSW hit by ransomware attack

By Ry Crozier on May 14, 2018 12:01PM

May have compromised online databases.

Family Planning NSW was hit by a ransomware attack late last month and the clinic operator is warning that its “online databases” may have been compromised.
The provider of reproductive and health services said the databases contained the details of people who had made contact through its website to “seek appointments or leave feedback” over the past 2.5 years.
Sky News reported that as many as 8000 people may have been impacted.
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Family Planning NSW details ransomware attack

Hit by ransomware attack on ANZAC Day
Rohan Pearce (Computerworld) 14 May, 2018 12:38
Family Planning NSW has written to clients revealing that a “cyber-attack” on its website may have compromised a number of its online databases.
“These databases contained information from clients who had contacted Family Planning NSW through our website in the past two-and-a-half years, seeking appointments or leaving feedback,” said an email signed by Sue Carrick, chair of the organisation's board, and CEO Ann Brassil.
Family Planning NSW said that the organisation suffered a ransomware attack on ANZAC Day
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Anzac Day cyber attack compromises personal data of 8000 clients

  • The Australian
  • 12:52PM May 14, 2018

Remy Varga

The data of potentially 8000 people has been compromised after a reproductive and sexual health agency was targeted in an Anzac Day cyber attack.
Family Planning NSW said its databases containing the personal information of all clients who had contacted the agency via its website in the past two and a half years had been compromised in an email sent to clients this morning.
The sexual and reproductive healthcare service provider specialises in contraception, abortion, sexually transmitted infections, menstruation, menopause, gynaecological problems, cervical and breast screenings and men’s sexual health.
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Artificially intelligent doctors can help Australia lead world in health

  • The Australian
  • 12:00AM May 15, 2018

Sian Powell

Australia should use some of the recently announced Medical Research Future Fund’s $240 million for frontier science and seize the opportunity of developing next-generation artificially ­intelligent healthcare systems, according to an Australian ­expert in the field.
Enrico Coiera, a health informatics expert at Macquarie University, said a possible scenario could include patients explaining their symptoms and their illness history to an artificially intelligent agent before the ­patients see a human doctor.
“You can tell them your problems and the reason you’re there, and by the time you see the doctor there’s already a summary of the issues,” he said.
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Vic privacy commissioner: publishing de-identified citizen records is a ‘risky enterprise’

By Stephen Easton • 15/05/2018
Victorian privacy commissioner Rachel Dixon has commissioned critical advice for public servants from three Melbourne academics who have worked hard to raise awareness of the risk that individuals can be re-identified from open data publications.
Not so long ago, few public servants questioned the received wisdom that large sets of data about individuals were safe to release as long as enough personal information was removed. That has all changed in recent years, thanks largely to the work of Dr Vanessa Teague, Dr Chris Culnane and Dr Benjamin Rubinstein.
Their work has led to a ruling against the Department of Health, which agreed to an enforceable undertaking after the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner found it had breached the Privacy Act earlier this year, but did not leave any individual citizen’s identity “reasonably identifiable” for the purposes of the federal act (which is similar in this regard to state privacy laws).
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Real-time monitoring on track

SafeScript is on track to be rolled out in October, however according to reports NSW is lagging a fair way behind

SafeScript, Victoria’s real-time prescription monitoring system, is still on track for implementation in October 2018.
To be developed by Fred IT Group, roll-out will reportedly be focused in a specific geographical location before being extended to the rest of the state in early 2019.
SafeScript will capture prescription records for all Schedule 8 medicines and Schedule 4 benzodiazepines, z-drugs and quetiapine.
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Should you prescribe a health app?

Australian research suggests few of them actually work
10th May 2018
There is little evidence that health apps for managing chronic conditions do what they say they do, according to the results of an Australian study.
Four Bond University academics conducted an overview of systematic reviews to identify “prescribable”, standalone health apps suitable for use in a primary care setting.
Only 22 apps fit this description, but the reviewers caution that the risk of bias in the randomised controlled trials analysed was high and the overall quality of the evidence of effectiveness was very low.
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HBF exits policy comparison websites

  • The Australian
  • 10:57AM May 14, 2018

Sarah-Jane Tasker

Private health insurer HBF has pulled its products from comparator websites after its internal analysis revealed the industry paid brokers more than $150 million last year.
As affordability concerns hit the sector, health insurers have also warned that concerns about financial advice that were raised in the banking royal commission should serve as a warning to the private health-insurance sector about commission-based advice.
John Van Der Wielen, chief executive of not-for-profit insurer HBF, said he believed that the “churn” — consumers swapping or downgrading policies — created by the comparator sites and the cost of using those sites was driving premiums up across the industry.
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Govt releases My Health Record secondary data use plan

By Justin Hendry on May 11, 2018 4:22PM

Provides more detail on opt-out model.

The Department of Health has released the framework governing secondary use of data from the My Health Record, providing more detail on the opt-out approach it has settled on for releasing "de-identified" information.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said the framework [pdf] will inform how records data can be used for public health policy, planning and release purposes from 2020.
It has been more than two years in the making, with the department consulting with clinicians, medical researchers, consumers and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner during its development.
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This is how your data in the My Health Record will be used

On Friday the Federal Government quietly released its long-awaited framework for secondary use of information contained within the My Health Record. It will generate discussion as it is controversial.

The release of the framework to guide the secondary use of My Health Record (MyHR) system data comes just months before the participation rules for the Australian national health record change from opt-in to opt-out.
Consent for secondary use is implied if consumers don’t opt out of the MyHR. In other words, people need to take action if they don’t want their health data to be used for purposes other than direct clinical care.
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Private sector may be able to access My Health Record data for research

Government releases framework for secondary uses of My Health Record data
Rohan Pearce (Computerworld) 14 May, 2018 06:30
Use of both de-identified data and, in some circumstances, identifiable data will be permitted under a new government framework for so-called “secondary use” of data derived from the national eHealth record system. Linking data from the My Health Record system to other datasets is also allowed under some circumstances.
The Department of Health last year commissioned the development of the framework for using My Health Record data for purposes other than its primary purpose of providing healthcare to an individual.
Secondary use can include research, policy analysis and work on improving health services.
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My Health Record secondary data must stay in Australia and not be used for 'solely commercial' reasons

The Australian government's My Health Record data use guidelines require the data governance board to make case-by-case decisions on how the data can be used.
By Asha McLean | May 13, 2018 -- 23:33 GMT (09:33 AEST) | Topic: Security
The Australian government has published guidelines on the third-party use of data from its contentious My Health Record, with the Secondary Use of Data Governance Board charged with making many of the decisions on who and why data can be used, on a case-by-case basis.
My Health Record is Australia's electronic health records system, given the green light in August 2017 from the Council of Australian Governments Health Council (COAG) to begin automatically signing up Australians.
By 2018, all Australians will have a My Health Record, and by 2022, all healthcare providers will be able to contribute to and use health information stored in My Health Record on behalf of their patients. They will also be able to communicate with other healthcare providers on the clinical status of joint patients via the digital platform.
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Starts at 60 Writers • In Health • On Wednesday 18th Apr, 2018

Paranoid patients of ‘Dr Google’ are costing the health system

In recent years, people have increasingly turned to the internet for answers to health worries, but it comes at a cost to the health system itself, according to doctors.
The Courier Mail reported on Wednesday that in Queensland, patients seeking health advice from ‘Dr Google’ had increased by 130 per cent in the past year, with nearly half of all internet users admitting to self-diagnosing on the basis of online searches.
And while the Australian Medical Association’s Queensland President, Dr Bill Boyd, 65, told Starts at 60 that self-diagnosing was nothing new, he did say that patients who were particularly insistent that their ‘diagnosis’ be investigated did often managed to push doctors into conducting costly and unnecessary tests.
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Media release - Empowering health workforce to drive improvements in patient care

18 May, 2018
Australian clinical digital health leaders are being invited to join a new national network to champion digital health throughout hospitals and healthcare organisations. The network will provide forums and channels for knowledge sharing that supports improved patient care.
Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) and the Australasian College of Health Informatics (ACHI) launched the Chief X Information Officer (CXIO) Network today in partnership with the Australian Digital Health Agency.
HISA CEO Dr Louise Schaper said that clinicians have a unique role in transforming the health system as both advancers and protectors in the digital health age.
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Digital Health Test Beds Industry Briefing

16 May, 2018
The Australian Digital Health Agency has recently launched a request for expressions of interest calling for proposals for innovative digital health test beds. It is intended that projects will produce evidence of the positive impact of new digitally-enabled services and models of care, and demonstrate that they are sustainable, can be rigorously reviewed and then scaled nationally. The briefing will consist of an overview of the Agency, the National Digital Health Strategy, My Health Record, and the proposed digital health test beds including key objectives, approach, health priority areas, participation criteria, and the procurement process. Following this, there will the opportunity to ask questions.
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Aussies now ‘more comfortable’ with data sharing: research

Concern over data privacy is common in Australia but there are signs comfort towards data sharing is improving, according to newly published research revealing 44% of Aussies agree that they feel more comfortable about the issue of exchanging personal information with companies than in the past.
Research conducted by the Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA) and the Global Alliance of Data-Driven Marketing Associations (GDMA) – to coincide with Privacy Awareness Week - found that awareness of data practice is growing among Australians.
National Privacy Awareness Week 2018 runs from 14 to 20 May under the theme ‘Value personal data – it’s worth protecting’.
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Transparency on personal data use important to Aussies: study

Australian consumers are more trusting about the use of their personal information by companies - particularly those offering digital goods and services - which are transparent about what they do with their data, according to a newly released privacy study.
The study by accountancy firm Deloitte reveals brands that offer primarily digital goods and services ranked better on transparency measures, with Information Technology operations the stand out rising from 9 out of 10 to number 1 on the index.
According to the annual assessment of the privacy practices of the 100 top brands, Australian consumers choose brands that are transparent about what they do with their data - and they want to know how their personal information will be used, and how it will be protected.
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Farms to inner city Melbourne: suicide prevention trial extended

By Michaela Whitbourn
14 May 2018 — 12:15am
The Turnbull government is extending a multimillion-dollar suicide prevention trial targeting 12 places in Australia where residents are at a higher than average risk of taking their own lives, including north-western Melbourne, northern Queensland and Tasmania.
The national suicide prevention plan was launched in 2016 with funding of $36 million and was slated to run until June next year.
Health Minister Greg Hunt will announce on Monday the trials will be extended by a year to June 30, 2020, with a budget boost of $13 million.
Among the strategies being implemented are education programs in schools, improved healthcare after suicide attempts and e-health programs, including iPad surveys in doctors' waiting rooms allowing patients to indicate discreetly if they are in need of support.
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Health bureaucracy: time to rein it in

Authored by Joseph Ting
HEALTH CARE administration claims to improve accessibility and quality of care delivered to the community. The composite roles of human resources and financial management, cost accounting, data collection and analysis, strategic planning and marketing, among others, aim to provide “top quality and highly effective patient care”.
However, administrators in our hospitals and clinics have also been accused by the media of being costly and bureaucratic. Australia’s federal Department of Health employs 4500 non-clinical staff at an average salary of $222 000 each, according to The Australian. Although 15% (in England) to 25% (in the US) of health care budgets in the advanced economies are consumed by health care administration, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development contends this to be “wasteful, [making] no or minimal contribution to good health outcomes”. There is no link between higher administrative budgets, better quality care, life expectancy and other health indices (here and here).
In 2015–16, over 10% of Australia’s gross domestic product ($170.4 billion) was spent on health care, with a sizeable proportion funding administrative services.
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Digital rights report calls for data retention rollback, privacy reform

Report calls for shake-up of Australian privacy law
Rohan Pearce (Computerworld) 14 May, 2018 05:00
A new report on the state of digital rights in Australia has called for the repeal of the country’s mandatory data retention legislation and new laws to protect individuals’ privacy.
The publication of the State of Digital rights report was coordinated by Digital Rights Watch and endorsed by a range of human rights organisations, including the Australian Privacy Foundation, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Amnesty International Australia, the Human Rights Law Centre, Liberty Victoria, the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, and Save the Children Australia.
It includes more than two-dozen key recommendations, including an end to the data retention scheme.
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State of digital rights

14 May 2018
In the space of just a few years, the human rights movement has crashed into a technological, social and moral wall. The true impacts of serious violations of our personal digital rights are starting to hit very close to home for a lot of people, and the world will never be the same.
The revelations put forward by Edward Snowden on the scale and reach of the United States’ surveillance capability, whistleblowing by Chelsea Manning that blew the lid off military manipulation, corruption and coercion, the exposure of mass-manipulation of democratic elections by Cambridge Analytica - all of these have certainly contributed to a heightened awareness of the potential impact of digital rights. But these high-profile incidents are just scratching the surface of a much wider, systematic and willful degradation of our human rights online.
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Facebook censors GPs' toilet talk, thwarting cancer campaign

The social giant prefers 'stool' over 'poo' — but is that how people talk?
14th May 2018
One of Australia’s most eminent GPs has been barred by Facebook and a radio station over his potty mouth.
Professor Max Kamien and a list of other WA GPs were recruited for advertisements urging people to check for blood in their faeces and urine as part of early bowel and other cancer detection. In a move to make the message as clear and unambiguous as possible, the advertisements use the words "poo" and "pee".
But Facebook has refused to post images from the adverts because the phrases "blood in your poo", "bloody poo" and "do you have cancer?" contain specific, personal attributes of physical conditions, which are banned under the social giant's media rules.
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Blockchain could be a game changer in medical clinical trials, says top expert

Health Special Report - Sponsored
Blockchain has been one of the biggest tech disrupters in the past year – and industries such as pharmaceuticals and med-tech are realising the potential benefits.
Blockchain is a “distributed ledger” technology – a means of storing transaction records securely, transparently and in a decentralised fashion.
The technology is best known for underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin — but it’s finding uses in areas such as agriculture and medicine because of its ability to secure supply chain data.
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  • Updated May 15 2018 at 11:00 PM

Magnet implants? Welcome to the world of biohackers and medical punk

by Alice Hines and Arden Wray
Louis Anderson, a 16-year-old aspiring biotech entrepreneur, eats dinner with an anarchist, a world-renowned tongue splitter and at least 30 people who have implanted themselves with magnets or radio-frequency identification chips, aka RFID implants, for fun on a recent Friday night in Tehachapi, California.
We're at Grindfest, an annual meet-up of biohackers, and Louis has never met a single member of the community in the flesh before, although he's been planning the trip for two years. They have a lot to talk about.
Will artificial intelligence kill us or save us? Will global warming be worse than experts predict? When will the next financial crisis strike? What brings Louis here?
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What happened when a Melbourne practice worked an app into day-to-day care

16 May 2018

TECH TALK

Any 116-year-old medical practice will have seen its fair share of new developments. It will also have seen plenty of ideas dumped by the wayside.
This Melbourne practice most recently became the testing ground for another trial — working a smartphone app into its day-to-day care.
For two months, the practice’s young patients aged 14-25 filled in a health questionnaire via the app before their consultation.
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Eight days before GDPR, Australian firms seem unprepared

More than 90% of Australian IT decision-makers, who took part in a survey that looked at their readiness to meet the standards of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, that takes effect on 25 May, have admitted that their companies are not yet ready to meet the standards demanded by the new law.
Additionally, just over a fifth (22%) said the organisations they represented could comply with the GDPR's provisions, which require them to disclose all personal data collected on individuals within one month of request.
The survey, conducted by security firm Webroot, covered 600 IT decision-makers in the US, the UK and Australia - 200 from Australia - who worked for companies that had between 100 and 499 employees.
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AI will expand the work of radiologists, not replace them

  • Thomas H. Davenport
  • The Australian
  • 12:00AM May 19, 2018
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to speculation AI might replace human radio­logists one day. Researchers have ­developed deep learning neural networks that can identify pathologies in radiological images such as bone fractures and potentially cancerous lesions, in some cases more reliably than an average radiologist. For the most part, though, the best AI systems are on par with human performance and are used only in research settings.
That said, deep learning is rapidly advancing, and it is a much better technology than previous approaches to medical image analysis. This portends a future in which AI plays an important role in radiology. What does this mean for radiologists? We’re confident most radiologists will continue to have jobs in the decades to come — jobs that will be ­altered and ­enhanced by AI. We see several reasons radiologists won’t disappear from the labour force.
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E-obs provider Patientrack to be acquired by Aussie informatics firm

E-observations platform provider Patientrack will expand its work with NHS hospitals in England after announcing its acquisition by health informatics software company, Alcidion.
Owen Hughes – 17 May 2018
Patientrack said the move would  “create a powerful specialist healthcare technology company focused on next-generation patient safety, decision intelligence and analytics technology for healthcare.”
Hospitals will benefit from the same Patientrack team in the UK while gaining access to new services and products offered by Australia-based Alcidion, the company added.
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Emory cares for ICU patients remotely, turning 'night into day' from Australia

Woodruff Health Sciences Center | May 9, 2018
A partnership involving Emory Healthcare, Royal Perth Hospital in Australia and health technology company Philips will move night intensive care work in the Emory eICU Center into daylight hours, focusing on the globalization of critical care medicine. The new project will allow Emory physicians and nurses to deliver care from the other side of the Earth by working in daylight hours in Australia to cover nighttime hours in Atlanta.
The vision to turn “night into day” was developed by Timothy Buchman, PhD, MD, founding director of the Emory Critical Care Center and Cheryl Hiddleson, MSN, RN, director of the Emory eICU Center.
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G Medical Innovations president provides company with loan of up to $3 million

08:31 18 May 2018
The loan will result in short-term funding for the mobile health technology provider.
The company's mobile case transforms a smartphone into a medical monitoring device.
G Medical Innovations Holdings Ltd (ASX:GMV) president and chief executive officer Yacov Geva has provided an unsecured loan to the company of up to $3 million.
The arrangement will result in short-term funding for the mobile health technology provider.
It will fund G Medical’s inventory, medical devices and working capital requirements.
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36,000 homes to be HFC ready by end June: NBN Co

About 36,000 homes across Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth will be declared "ready to connect" via HFC to the national broadband network by the end of June.
NBN Co chief network engineering officer Peter Ryan said in a monthly update on Wednesday that this was expected to be the first tranche of HFC connections after the suspension that was announced in November last year due to technical issues with the state of the Telstra HFC network.
The NBN Co had said in April that about 38,000 premises would be released by the end of June. No reason was given for the drop of 2000 in the number of premises being ready to connect between that announcement and today's update.
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Telstra admits its role under NBN is hurting

By Ry Crozier on May 14, 2018 9:53AM

Steps up blame for its financial woes.

Telstra says the level of competition brought about by the NBN will result in financial pain that extends into 2019.
CEO Andy Penn will tell a JPMorgan summit in Boston tomorrow that the NBN is behind “a number of  challenging dynamics for the industry that collectively points to a difficult trading period ahead”.
Penn will say that the re-nationalisation of fixed-line infrastructure - and the re-positioning of Telstra as “a reseller of broadband services with other operators … is having a very material impact on the economics of the whole industry”.
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Enjoy!
David.

Privacy concerns over My Health Record system

Privacy concerns over My Health Record system

20 May, 2018 / 04:13
Rev. Bill spoke to Bernard Robertson-Dunn, chair of the Health Committee for The Australian Privacy Foundation, about the My Health Record opt-out function and privacy concerns as healthcare industries sign up to connect with My Health Record.

Download this podcast here

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More audio from the Privacy Foundation.

David.