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
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The big event of the week was the release of the ADHA Annual Report for 2018-19. Despite being released on Melbourne Cup Day there was a lot of coverage in both general and specialist press – especially regarding breach numbers – which were claimed to be utterly innocuous – but which still seem to be happening.
Otherwise there are some fun bits and pieces.
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Wrong parent put on baby’s My Health Record among 37 data breaches
By Dana McCauley
November 5, 2019 — 7.45pm
Thirty-seven data breaches involving the federal government's controversial digital health records system were reported in 2018-19, including one where the wrong parent was given access to a baby's My Health Record.
The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) annual report, released on Melbourne Cup Day, revealed all but three of the data breaches were made by Services Australia, formerly the Department of Human Services.
Most involved "administrative errors" but three cases involved "unauthorised access to an individual's My Health Record", including one resulting from "an incorrect parental authorised representative being assigned to the child".
An ADHA spokesman said the breach was a manual error that occurred while processing a form used to register a newborn for Medicare and My Health Record. The other two cases of unauthorised access were by clinicians suspected of Medicare fraud.
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My Health Record data breaches fall
But complaints skyrocket with opt-out switch.
The number of data breaches involving the My Health Record system fell from 42 to 38 in the past financial year, despite a significant uptick in Australians with a personal electronic health record.
In its most recent annual report, the Australian Digital Health Agency said “38 matters (in 35 notifications) were reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner” in 2018-19.
This compares with “42 data breaches (in 28 notifications)” in 2017-18 and “35 data breach notifications” in 2016-17.
However, as with previous years, there were “no purposeful or malicious attacks compromising the integrity or security of the My Health Record system” over the financial year.
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Pharmacies remain biggest adopters of My Health Record
No malicious attacks were reported in the past financial year
6th November 2019
Pharmacies are the biggest adopters of My Health Record, with over 85% registered as of June, according to the Australian Digital Health Agency's 2018/19 annual report tabled in federal Parliament.
However, there is a need to translate the registrations into action, as only 66% have uploaded to the system, below the 80% projected for 2018/19.
The report noted that 11 of 14 pharmacy dispensing software systems now conform with the system. There were 56 million prescription and dispense records uploaded in the 2018/19 financial year, up from 21 million in the previous year.
There were more than 30 breaches of patient records in the financial year, but none were malicious attacks and were mostly a result of administrative errors.
There were just three cases of unauthorised access.
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My Health Record 'breaches' mostly fixing mismatched Medicare records
The breaches were mostly the result of data integrity activity initiated by Services Australia to identify intertwined Medicare records, rather than unauthorised access for nefarious activity.
The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), the agency responsible for oversight of My Health Record, this week revealed a handful of occurrences where the security of the contentious medical records system was compromised.
The ADHA's annual report [PDF] revealed there were 38 matters reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) during the year concerning potential unauthorised access, security, or integrity breaches.
37 of these matters were counted as breaches, and the ADHA said most were the result of administrative errors such as "intertwined" Medicare records or processing errors when creating records for infants.
Three involved the unauthorised access to an individual's My Health Record.
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Dozens of My Health Record breaches reported
Administrative errors are mainly to blame, says digital health agency
6th November 2019
By AAP
There were 37 breaches of Australia's My Health Record system in 2018/19, according to the overseeing agency's annual report.
The Australian Digital Health Agency says most breaches are attributable to administrative errors.
But, the report says there have been no purposeful or malicious attacks that have compromised the integrity of the My Health Record system.
The agency said the administrative errors were mainly around individual records being used by multiple people, or "processing errors" when creating records for babies.
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My Health Record complaints skyrocket
And there were 38 data breaches.
By Lilia Guan on Nov 07 2019 12:01 PM
The number of email complaints about My Health Record rose more than 400% during July 2018 and January 2019, according to The Australian Digital Health Agency’s (ADHA) latest annual report.
Released under the radar on Melbourne Cup day, the report highlights the number of complaints rose from 57 to 304.
ADHA attributed to the rise in email complaints to the extended opt-out period between July 2018 and January 2019, where 2.5 million people opted out of My Health Record.
ADHA told Information Age “the Agency has worked with healthcare providers and industry partners and will continue to support the health and wellbeing of the Australian community through improved access to digital services”.
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ADHA touts success of National Digital Health Strategy, plans 2020 outlook
Nathan Eddy | 08 Nov 2019
The Australian Digital Health Agency, the organization tasked with improving health outcomes for the country's citizens through the delivery of digital healthcare systems, has claimed "significant progress" towards the National Digital Health Strategy.
ADHA, which is also the system operator of the digital electronic health record platform My Health Record, released a report covering 2018 and 2019, showing the system now covers 90 percent of Australians and has improved access to clinical information within it.
The report shows that more than 75 percent of public hospital beds are connected and uploading, and 60 percent of pathology services are connected with almost all public providers uploading.
Meanwhile, the imperative of medicine safety has led community pharmacy to be the largest adopter in the last 12 months with over 80 percent of community pharmacies registered and more than 60 percent connected to view and contribute to My Health Record.
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Media Release: Significant progress made on the National Digital Health Strategy
4 November 2019: The Australian Digital Health Agency 2018–19 Annual Report has been tabled in the Australian Parliament, outlining the Agency’s outcomes and operations between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2019.
“The 2018–19 Annual Report shows the Agency is making significant progress toward the key priorities set out in the National Digital Health Strategy, endorsed by all state and territory governments through the Council of Australian Government (COAG) Health Council,” says Agency Chief Executive Officer, Tim Kelsey.
The Annual Report shows that in 2018–19, the Agency:
- Provided My Health Records for 90 per cent of Australians, equipping people and their care professionals with centralised, digital access to vital health information.
- Improved access to clinical information in My Health Record, with more than one billion documents uploaded to the system and significant increases in the number of providers uploading information.
- Developed a national framework, and new interoperability standards, to ensure health professionals can securely and quickly send patient information to one another without using a fax machine.
- Released the Pharmacist Shared Medicines List (PSML) document type to further improve medicines safety, piggybacking on the success of the Medicines View document and its aggregation of all relevant medicines and allergy data in a single, real-time view.
- Facilitated consultations across every state and territory to lay the foundation for Australia’s next Interoperability Roadmap, which will set the direction for improving the ability of health systems to securely communicate with one another.
“Whereas in previous years our focus was on rebuilding momentum for digital health and on designing the way forward with our partners, in 2018 – 19 the Agency successfully implemented key parts of the National Digital Health Strategy to support improved health outcomes for Australians,” says Mr Kelsey.
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Queensland police 'brought into disrepute' by computer system misuse, says commissioner
Exclusive: Katarina Carroll’s statement was emailed to officers across the state on Wednesday
Thu 7 Nov 2019 11.59 AEDT Last modified on Thu 7 Nov 2019 13.22 AEDT
The misuse of Queensland police computer systems by current and former officers has “brought our organisation into disrepute”, the police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, has said.
Carroll’s statement, emailed to police across the state on Wednesday night, was made ahead of hearings by the Crime and Corruption Commission into public-sector data misuse and several high-profile cases that have highlighted the extent of the problem.
The commission will begin hearing public evidence on Monday. The process is expected to lay bare the extent of a situation described by civil liberties groups as a systemic problem that had caused the public to lose trust in police.
Carroll’s email appears to be an attempt to underscore police efforts to acknowledge and manage the problem before the hearings begin.
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Aussie health tech start-up raises $6m, bags international deal
Nov 5, 2019 — 12.00am
HealthMatch, an Australian start-up that has created a digital platform for sick patients to be matched with suitable clinical trials, has raised $6 million in a round led by venture capital funds Square Peg and Tempus Partners.
The company was co-founded by its chief executive, Manuri Gunawardena, when she was studying medicine and has grown rapidly, also securing a new commercial multi-country partnership with Swiss-based Roche Pharmaceuticals.
Ms Gunawardena said she planned to use the money to beef up her team of six, recruit more drug trials onto the site, and get more patients on the platform across Asia-Pacific and ultimately the United States.
The new commercial partnership means the platform can list clinical trials from Roche directly, rather than just off public registries, and it will take a cut each time a patient is successfully matched to one of their trials.
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Pilot flies in, ready to shake up men’s health
Men’s healthcare is primed for disruption, according to two former executives of mattress giant Koala who have formed Pilot, a tech platform that enables men to take action on some of their most stigmatised health problems.
Pilot is on track to take in $3m in revenue this year, and about 4000 people a day visit the start-up’s website.
They’re numbers that co-founders Tim Doyle and Charlie Gearside say are testament to a rapidly growing appetite for telehealth in Australia.
Patients first answer an in-depth questionnaire of about 50 questions, then pay $20 for it to be sent to a GP on the Pilot platform.
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Phone app connecting rural men with GPs
· Australian Associated Press
The problem had played on Ty's mind for three years.
Online ads promising solutions seemed like scams, a specialist was hundreds of kilometres from his home in Katherine in the Northern Territory and beyond his wife, nobody knew.
"I had some recent surgery and it ended up causing premature ejaculation," Ty told AAP.
"When all of a sudden this pops up and you're in your 30s - you start getting anxious about it."
When Ty came across an advertisement online unlike others he'd seen, he decided to take a chance on the men's healthcare phone app Pilot.
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Thursday, 07 November 2019 10:23
Data breaches worst in Australia, says Cisco. But beware ‘cybersecurity fatigue’
Cisco’s annual Asia Pacific Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Benchmark Study says that data breaches are costing Australian businesses more than those in any other country in the region.
The study interviewed almost 2,000 security professionals across 11 countries including 209 in Australia . It found that most Australian organisations have suffered a breach which cost over $1 million and had a significant impact to business.
Longer downtime is one of the key factors identified in the study that is resulting in higher financial costs to businesses. The study looked into the effect and costs of outages on Australian businesses and found that 75% of Australian organisations experienced an outage of 5-16 hours. This is significantly longer than the global average of 43%. A massive 84% of Australian businesses also reported their most severe breach cost them over $1 million, higher than any other country in the Asia Pacific region of the report.
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The new products and services helping older Aussies stay in their own home
Nov 08, 2019
It used to be that when your health began to decline in old age, it was time to move into an aged care facility, or at very least into a downstairs bedroom at a family member’s house.
But that was before so many products and services were available to make your own home a comfortable, safe place for as long as you wish to stay.
Plenty of companies now cater to the natural desire to ‘age in place’ and the Australian Research Council has even set up a Research Hub for Digital Enhanced Living to investigate how even more and better products can be developed to allow older Australians to live independently for longer.
If you’re worried about your own ability to stay in your own home, or want to help a loved one do so safely, it’s worth checking out these ideas, ranging from comfort-height toilets for those with mobility or joint issue to motion detectors for falls and smart utensils for eating, that could make life easier. You may be surprised at what’s out there!
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Alcidion successfully raises $16.2m via placement to institutional investors
Highlights
- Successfully raised $16.2 million via an oversubscribed Institutional Placement (‘Placement’) at 18 cents per new share
- Placement was strongly supported by new institutional shareholders
- Placement proceeds will be used to accelerate the Company’s growth strategy and the Company now has a strengthened balance sheet to execute strategic plan
Melbourne, Victoria – Alcidion Group Ltd (ASX: ALC) (‘Alcidion’ or the ‘Company’) is pleased to announce the successful completion of an Institutional Placement of 90 million fully paid shares at 18 cents per new share, raising a total of $16.2 million.
The placement saw strong support from new and existing institutional investors, bringing several leading institutions onto Alcidion’s share register as cornerstone investors.
The placement saw strong support from new and existing institutional investors, bringing several leading institutions onto Alcidion’s share register as cornerstone investors.
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Tinder co-founders swipe right on men's health start-up
Nov 4, 2019 — 10.00am
The co-founders of global dating app Tinder have made their first Australian investment, backing early stage men's health start-up MOSH in a $1 million raise.
Tinder's Sean Rad and Justin Mateen were introduced to MOSH co-founders David Narunsky and Gabe Baker through mutual friends and after six months of back and forth and a lunch in Los Angeles, the local company became Mr Rad's 51st investment.
MOSH describes itself as a digital health clinic for men, enabling them to book online telehealth consultations for issues like hair loss, skin problems or sexual health, which they may not feel comfortable visiting a doctor in person about.
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Kings in MedAdvisor e-prescription fulfilment deal
Date: 04.11.2019
Move comes as nation gears up for paperless prescriptions
Kings Transport has linked with MedAdvisor in a medication delivery deal as developments in electronic prescriptions (e-prescribing) proceed apace.
King will look after transport and logistics needs of the listed digital medication management company’s network of 3,300 pharmacies and its individual customer app and SMS reminder service calls.
"Kings is proud to partner with MedAdvisor to provide distribution solutions with a commitment to emerging market services and technologies," Kings CEO Barry Thompson says.
"We have had a long-standing presence within the wellness industry, so we clearly understand the strict guidelines of transporting and delivering medications.
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Wednesday, 06 November 2019 12:10
Monash IVF Group hacked, phishing emails sent to patients
Fertility business Monash IVF Group has had its internal email servers hacked, but has not made any public announcement about it yet.
The company, which has connections to fertility clinics in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory, told the ABC that experts were working to determine the extent of the infirltration.
The hack appears to have come to light when patients received phishing emails from scammers and contacted the ABC to complain.
Monash IVF Group has no media contact listed on its website.
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IVF clinic warns of phishing after ‘cyber attack’
No indication patient database accessed, Monash IVF Group CEO says
Monash IVF Group says it has been subject to a “malicious cyber attack” targeting its email system.
Group chief executive Michael Knaap said that attackers “appear to have accessed and copied some emails” but early investigations have not revealed any indication that Monash’s confidential patient database had been accessed. The CEO said that the database is stored on a separate system from Monash's email server.
Knaap said that “a team of forensic IT experts are working as quickly as they can to ascertain the exact nature of the attack.”
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https://itwire.com/security/trend-micro-employee-sacked-for-accessing-and-selling-customer-data.html
Wednesday, 06 November 2019 09:52
Trend Micro employee sacked for accessing and selling customer data
An employee of Japanese security outfit Trend Micro was caught accessing internal data and disclosing it to outsiders, the company says.
There were indications in August that some customers who were running the company's home security solution had been receiving calls from people claiming to be Trend Micro support staff, a statement from the firm said.
The information that these individuals said they possessed led to suspicion of some kind of co-ordinated attack.
"Although we immediately launched a thorough investigation, it was not until the end of October 2019 that we were able to definitively conclude that it was an insider threat," Trend Micro said.
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Hawke’s Bay live with regional clinical portal
Wednesday, 6 November 2019
eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth
On 28 August 2019, the DHB rolled out the central region’s Clinical Portal 8 from Orion Health, including medication management, patient alerts, ward-rounding handover and customisable patient lists.
A patient’s primary care record, pulled from GP systems, is available via the portal and has been accessed more than 7400 times since go-live.
More than 800 messages have also been sent to GPs using the new ‘note to GP’ functionality.
A Hawke’s Bay DHB clinical super-user group had been testing and using the portal for 10 months before the official go-live.
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Northland gets acute clinical telehealth network
Monday, 4 November 2019
Northland DHB has developed a mobile telehealth cart linking its rural hospitals to the intensive care unit at Whangārei Hospital.
The carts link rural hospitals in Kaitaia, Bay of Islands and Dargaville and will extend to Rawene next year.
ICU consultant and clinical lead for the project Michael Kalkoff says the new service allows 24/7 remote patient assessment and management in the acute clinical setting and enhances assistance and decision making for acute retrieval requests from rural hospitals.
It also provides Whangārei Hospital with an after-hours telestroke service.
“The carts create a truly integrated acute clinical telehealth network,” he says.
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Looming 5G threat to NBN just got real
Nov 8, 2019 — 4.30pm
Talk of 5G replacing the NBN has been little more than idle chatter for a long time. But this week talk turned to action when Optus announced it was ramping up the rollout of its nascent 5G fixed wireless product.
For $70 a month, Optus says customers will be able to get unlimited home broadband at download speeds of at least 50 megabits a second, and as much as 400 Mbps.
For the same price as an NBN connection, in other words, Optus claims customers will be able to get a far superior product.
Before declaring the NBN dead, it's important to note that the rollout of this product is limited. As of Monday, only 138,000 homes have access to it, compared to the more-than 10 million premises that can already connect to the NBN.
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NBN Co urged to over-provision downlink on all services
Giving all customers a chance of hitting top theoretical speed.
NBN Co is facing renewed pressure to over-dimension all its broadband services to make them capable of reaching the topline speeds that they promise.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) put its weight behind over-dimensioning this morning; Telstra has made similar overtures directly to NBN Co.
The ACCC’s concern stems from the latest broadband speed monitoring report, which highlights the “percentage of maximum plan speed used by protocol overhead” for the first time.
The report has a habit of raising one new issue or insight every time it is published; the last time it was a new metric that shamed retail service providers (RSPs) whose services underperformed advertised speeds.
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NBN’s internet performance isn’t up to speed, watchdog warns
NBN plans are failing to deliver the maximum speeds consumers are paying for, with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission saying retail telcos cannot provide 100 per cent of the advertised speed.
According to the regulator, consumers can never make full use of their plan speed even outside busy hours, with NBN speed tests never exceeding much more than 95 per cent of the plan speed.
The technical issue was present across all NBN speed tiers, the ACCC said.
“Headers, or tags, are added to consumers’ communications when they are sent over a network, to ensure the communications are sent to the right network addresses,” it said.
“The current capacity does not appear to allow for this extra data, preventing the communications from being sent at the maximum plan speed.
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NBN failing on speed promises
Nov 7, 2019 — 1.13pm
NBN's hybrid technology is coming far short of delivering advertised speeds. One in four customers on fibre-to-the-node connections rarely, if ever, get speeds above 75 per cent of what they are paying for.
A new report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission also finds that because of a technical quirk, it is impossible for retailers to deliver the nominal maximum speeds even if the technology permits it.
NBN Co offers residential customers four core packages, with maximum download speeds of 12, 25, 50 and 100 megabits per second (Mbps).
Across the board, the ACCC said 11.4 per cent of connections "never come close to reaching their maximum plan speed", which was a marginal improvement from 12.4 per cent in the last report.
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NBN Co runs into trouble on cheap gigabit plans
By Ry Crozier on Nov 5, 2019 7:00AM
Could still be costly to sell en masse, might not work on HFC.
NBN Co’s plan to cut the price of 250Mbps and gigabit services looks to be coming unstuck as retailers grapple with the total cost of making them work, and how to market them safely to hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) users.
One of the the key proposals in NBN Co's recent wholesale pricing review is to slash the uplink speed of 250Mbps and 1Gbps tier services in order to make them more affordable.
NBN Co has claimed its proposed pricing will result in steep discounts of up to 68 percent at the wholesale level.
While retail service providers (RSPs) are supportive of attempts to bring high-speed services into the reach of users, they’re unconvinced what is on the table will allow them to do it.
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Optus officially launches 5G, says it will ‘take on’ Telstra
· November 4, 2019
Optus has officially launched 5G services in Australia, with CEO Allen Lew saying the telco can go toe-to-toe with Telstra on offering reliable high speed mobile and fixed wireless services.
“We are going to take Telstra on in 5G, we have already done that in 4G and we are neck and neck with them on network coverage,” he told The Australian.
Optus, which currently has 290 5G sites in operations, is planning to have 1200 sites ready to go by March 2020.
Telstra launched 5G services in May and is aiming to deliver 5G coverage to at least 35 locations across Australia within the next 12 months. The telco is investing around $8 billion into its mobile network over the five years to June 30, 2019.
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After 41 years' travel, a dying probe passes into interstellar space
By Liam Mannix
November 5, 2019 — 3.00am
More than four decades ago a space probe was launched into the clear blue skies over Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Scientists hoped the probe – Voyager 2 – would visit the outer reaches of the solar system and photograph the giant planets.
It has somewhat exceeded expectations.
Late last year the probe punched through the protective bubble that surrounds the solar system.
It is now in interstellar space, the vast region between the stars.
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Enjoy!
David.
