Note: I have excluded (or marked out) any commentary taking significant funding from the Agency or the Department of Health on all this to avoid what amounts to paid propaganda. (e.g. CHF, RACGP, AMA, National Rural Health Alliance etc. where they were simply putting the ADHA line – viz. that the myHR is a wonderfully useful clinical development that will save huge numbers of lives at no risk to anyone – which is plainly untrue) (This signifies probable ADHA Propaganda)
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Note: I have also broadened this section to try to cover all the privacy and security compromising and impacting announcements in the week – along with the myHR. It never seems to stop! Sadly social media platforms get a large run this week and most weeks. Sadly there is also the need to recognize polly based risks to privacy!
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The Un-healthiness of the Australian Health Sector’s Data Security
Blog Security & Privacy // Bytes
More than twelve months after the commencement of the Australian Notifiable Data Breach Scheme,[1] statistics published by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) have begun to reveal trends present in the 812 notifiable data breaches recorded in Australia between 22 February and 31 December 2018. One key trend is the clear susceptibility of the health care industry, which suffered one fifth of all data breaches recorded in Australia throughout 2018, the highest number on an industry scale.
There is a cruel sense of irony that the services we turn to when we are vulnerable are themselves vulnerable, suffering data breaches that may harm us financially, psychologically or, in extreme circumstances, physically. The figures are stark, with 163 notifiable data breaches suffered by health sector businesses that are subject to the federal Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), which does not include the country’s major hospitals operated under State jurisdictions. On top of these figures, the Australian Digital Health Agency, the agency responsible for administering the controversial ‘My Health Record’ system,[2] reported that a further 42 data breaches affected Australian My Health Records throughout 2018, which are also excluded from the statistics recorded in the OAIC’s reports.
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Sean and Connor's My Health Record story
Comment – An expensively produced video fantasy on the value of the #myHR from the ADHA.
ADHA Propaganda
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Overcoming barriers to My Health Record implementation - Canberra
Time Wednesday, 8 May 2019 - 7:30pm to 9:30pm ADHA Propaganda
Venue Pharmacy House, Level 1, 17 Denison St, Deakin, ACT, 2600
Event detail
This workshop is available at no cost to all pharmacists.
This workshop will provide participants with practical evidence-based strategies for practice change, and the opportunity to engage with digital health leaders to overcome potential barriers to successfully implementing MHR in their pharmacies.
Learning Objectives
After completing this activity participants should be able to:
- Identify common barriers to implementation of MHR in pharmacy
- Discuss practical solutions to overcome implementation barriers
- Discuss patient consent, privacy and confidentiality issues
- Describe medico-legal responsibilities regarding MHR
- Recognise the value of a Pharmacists Shared Medicines List.
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Thursday, 02 May 2019 18:43
QUT researchers find Twitter 'bot' accounts targeting poll
Twitter accounts that are controlled largely by bots have been observed targeting Australians in the run-up to the Federal Election on 18 May, a researcher from the Queensland University of Technology Digital Media Research Centre claims.
Dr Timothy Graham, who is studying the phenomenon along with his colleague, Professor Axel Bruns, told iTWire that the research was still in an initial phase.
He provided iTWire with a list of 127 Twitter handles which he said had a high bot score. Among the characteristics contribute to such a score are incomplete or very simplistic profile information; few or no connection with other accounts or connections only with accounts suspected of being bots; or patterns of posting tweets that were unlikely to represent human activity.
"We used the state-of-the-art Botometer machine learning classifier to analyse the accounts," Dr Graham said. "The accounts I've sent you have a high bot score, which means that they are very likely to have been automated in a bot-like way.
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Government failing to address digital issues for citizens
Liberals score low on scorecard
Non-profit Digital Rights Watch (DRW) said the Morrison government has failed on all digital issues from protecting privacy to supporting encryption, copyright reform, and ethical government data use. The LNP scored a 1 out of 3 consecutively (no support/no information) on the issues listed.
DRW sent a survey to all major political parties to examine their public policy platforms and analyse prior voting history to come up with the scorecard.
The results shows the major political party’s standing on policy areas like:
- Protecting privacy, including policies on metadata retention, facial recognition and internet filters
- The right to use encrypted communications, most notably around the support for the Assistance and Access Act 2018
- Copyright reform, including support for safe harbour and fair use
- Ethics in government use of citizen’s data, including Centrelink robo-debt, oversight of surveillance agencies and My Health Record rollout.
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Medical AI: Can patent law keep up with the trajectory of innovation?
What was once only seen in science fiction movies, is now becoming reality. A surge in the applicability of artificial intelligence (AI) to mainstream life has occurred in the past 30 years, particularly in medicine. Techniques including artificial neural networks, fuzzy expert systems, evolutionary computation, and hybrid intelligent systems are being applied more than ever before to assist the medical community in patient diagnosis, with a similar or better success rate to their human counterparts.
The speed of innovation in the field of AI diagnostics is rapid. One concern for innovators is – can patent law keep up? There are patent eligibility challenges aplenty in major innovation destinations for both computer-based technologies and diagnostics. This article reviews examples of AI diagnostics, recent changes to patent subject matter eligibility and best practice in navigating these changes to protect medical AI in Australia and USA.
What is Medical AI?
According to the English Oxford Living Dictionary AI is “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”
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My Health Record for Physiotherapists, Podiatrists & Occupational Therapists
When: 6:00pm - 7:00pm Tuesday, 14th May 2019
Where: Webinar
Having access to relevant clinical information about your patient’s health status can be challenging and inefficient at times to source. This interactive webinar about My Health Record will explain how accessing this system can increase your efficiency and help you provide improved patient care and care coordination. An opportunity for Q&A will also be provided.
This webinar is targeted for Physiotherapists, Podiatrists, and Occupational Therapists to attend. But all other allied health care providers are welcome to attend.
Please note, registrations close 24hrs prior to webinar event. Presentation slides will be made available following the event to individuals who have registered to attend the webinar.
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Health care just a phone call away
By Emilie Mortensen*
Monday, 29 April, 2019
The evolution of telehealth services has seen rapid growth in recent years. A combination of the technology uptake from consumers alongside the advances in digital health have been the major drivers. Plus, the massive shift in consumer preferences in accessing health care and health information. Together this outlines the significance in the role that Australian health contact centres play.
First contact made
In 2017/18, an average of about 22,000 patients a day visited an Australian public hospital emergency department.1 This has had a steady incline of daily patients with the 2013/14 Australian hospital statistics stating a daily visitation of 19,700 patients.2
With the quantity of patients inundating the public hospital system, strides have been taken by health contact centres to provide additional means for Australians to access quality health care and health information through the numerous telehealth services available.
AS 5205:2019, Australian Health Contact Centres has been developed to guide the care consumers can expect to receive from health contact centres and to assist in providing a consistent approach to healthcare delivery across Australia.
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‘I’d like to think you could trust the government, but I don’t really think we can’: Australian women’s attitudes to and experiences of My Health Record
First Published April 29, 2019 Research Article
Abstract
The Australian government’s Australian Digital Health Agency is working towards its goal of enrolling every Australian in My Health Record, its national electronic health record system. This article reports findings from a qualitative project involving interviews and focus groups with Australian women about their use of digital health across the range of technologies available to them, including their attitudes to and experiences of My Health Record. A feminist new materialism perspective informed the project, working to surface the affordances, affective forces and relational connections that contributed to the opening up or closing off potential agential capacities when people come together with digitised systems such as My Health Record. These findings demonstrate that people’s personal experiences and feelings, the actions of others such as the agencies responsible for system implementation and function, their healthcare providers and broader social, cultural, technological and political factors are important in shaping their knowledge, interest in and acceptance of an electronic health record system. Even among this group of participants, who were experienced and active in finding and engaging with health information online, uncertainty and a lack of awareness of and interest in My Health Record were evident among many. Affordances such as technical difficulties were major barriers to enrolling and using the system successfully. No participants had yet found any benefit or use for it. Affective forces such as lack of trust and faith in the Australian government’s general technological expertise and concerns about data privacy and security were also key in many participants’ accounts.
Keywords Australia, digital health, digital sociology, electronic patient records, feminist new materialism, My Health Record, women
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Facebook overhauls messaging as it pivots to privacy
By Katie Paul on May 1, 2019 7:05AM
Tries to move past a stream of scandals while tapping new revenue sources.
Facebook Inc debuted an overhaul of its core social network on Tuesday, taking its first concrete steps to refashion itself into a private messaging and e-commerce company as it tries to move past a stream of scandals while tapping new revenue sources.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a fresh design for the world's biggest social network that de-emphasized its News Feed and showcased its messaging app, online marketplace and video-on-demand site.
The company also rolled out features aimed at encouraging users to interact with their close social circle as well as with businesses, such as a "Secret Crush" option for Facebook Dating and a tool for appointment booking.
Future Facebook to put privacy first
- The Times
- 12:00AM May 2, 2019
Mark Zuckerberg has declared that “the future is private” as he announced a redesign of Facebook’s website and apps in an attempt to restore trust among users.
The chief executive of the world’s biggest social network said that its 2.7 billion users would be steered towards small, encrypted group conversations and private messages.
Its apps — Facebook Messenger, the photo-sharing site Instagram and the WhatsApp messaging service — would also become interoperable, with users able to call and message each other across the different platforms.
“Over time I believe that a private social platform will be even more important to our lives than our digital town squares,” Mr Zuckerberg said at F8, Facebook’s annual conference for developers, in San Jose, California.
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Australia taking concrete steps to digitize itself this year
By Soumik Roy | 30 April, 2019
AUSTRALIA isn’t an exciting place to be when it comes to technology.
The country is at par with developed countries such as the US and the UK in many ways and has the financial resources needed for digitization — but it still struggles to adopt new technologies.
Fortunately, the government is aware of its weaknesses when it comes to a national digital transformation strategy. In the recent federal budget, the country made significant allocations to help accelerate its journey to digital.
The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) thoroughly reviewed the budget to piece together the various projects and found a number of new programs and allocations directed toward’s the country’s goal to digitize itself this year.
According to the AIIA’s review document, the government’s digital transformation strategy outlines more than 100 key projects and milestones and is backed by over AU$1 billion (US$700 million) of investment, being delivered by over 20 agencies over the next 24 months.
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The Terrible Truth About Alexa
Apr 29, 2019, 12:00pm
This week, I read through a history of everything I’ve said to Alexa, and it felt a little bit like reading an old diary. Until I remembered that the things I’ve told Alexa in private are stored on an Amazon server and have possibly been read by an Amazon employee. This is all to make Alexa better, the company keeps saying. However, to many people, it’s not immediately obvious how humans interacting with your seemingly private voice commands is anything other than surveillance. Alexa, these people say, is a spy hiding in a wiretapping device.
The debate over whether or not Alexa or any voice assistant is spying on us is years old at this point, and it’s not going away. Privacy advocates have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging these devices violate the Federal Wiretap Act. Journalists have investigated the dangers of always-on microphones and artificially intelligent voice assistants. Sceptical tech bloggers like me have argued these were more powerful than people realised and overloaded with privacy violations. Recent news stories about how Amazon employees review certain Alexa commands suggest the situation is worse than we thought.
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Professor urges DNA tests to eliminate inherited diseases
- The Times
- 12:00AM April 29, 2019
People should test their partner’s DNA before starting a family to minimise the risk of inherited disease, and may have to decide to stay childless, a senior Harvard professor said.
About 5 per cent of babies have inherited conditions such as muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anaemia. There are about 7000 such conditions, all due to parents being badly matched genetically.
In an interview with the science magazine Discove r, George Church, a professor of genetics who was one of the architects of the human genome project, says the world could be rid of such diseases if couples took DNA tests before having a family.
To eliminate the conditions, millions of couples would be advised not to have children, to use IVF so embryos can be screened or to consider genetic testing of their unborn baby with a view to termination.
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Perhaps social media was a big mistake
- 6:26AM April 29, 2019
Over the weekend The New Yorker magazine published a long article about the founder and CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, which contained the following eye-catching sentence:
“Since the 2016 election, it has grown increasingly clear that allowing young, mostly male technologists to build largely unregulated, proprietary, international networks, might have been a large-scale, high-stakes error in judgment.”
The writer, Anna Weiner, didn’t really develop that thought, and she was mainly on about Twitter and the fact that it’s more or less out of control now, but she was also obviously referring to Facebook, YouTube and Instagram as well. There are a few other wannabe social media platforms but they’re the ones that matter.
Of course, the idea that “allowing” them to be built might have been an error of judgment implies that they could have been stopped at some point, and while that’s theoretically possible, in reality it wasn’t. Those creepers have grown so fast they’ve covered the house before we had time to get the clippers out of the shed.
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MedicAlert®: more than an ID
MedicAlert® offers peace of mind for patients with allergy in a medical emergency
AUSTRALIA and New Zealand have among the highest prevalence of allergy rates of high income countries. An ASCIA-Access Economic Report estimated that almost 20% of Australians had experienced at least one allergic disease. Food allergies occur in around 5–10% of children and 2–4% of adults, with life-threatening food allergy rates having doubled in the past 10 years.
The most common triggers of food allergy are eggs, cow’s milk, peanuts, sesame, soy, wheat and seafood. As a health professional, you would have seen many mild to severe allergic reactions in patients. For many diagnosed patients, an avoidance strategy is an essential part of the overall management plan. However, this doesn’t take into account unplanned emergencies.
That’s why MedicAlert is an essential part of any long term management plan.
While the severity of allergy symptoms varies from patient to patient, all allergy symptoms can affect airways, nasal passages and digestive systems. In severe cases, allergies can trigger a life threatening anaphylaxis reaction.
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Comments welcome!
David.
