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This weekly blog is to explore the news around the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology, social media and related matters.
I will also try to highlight ADHA Propaganda when I come upon it.
Just so we keep count, the latest Notes from the ADHA Board were dated 6 December, 2018 and we have seen none since! It’s pretty sad!
Note: Appearance here is not to suggest I see any credibility or value in what follows. I will leave it to the reader to decide what is worthwhile and what is not! The point is to let people know what is being said / published that I have come upon.
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https://www.innovationaus.com/govt-looks-to-attract-more-foreign-investment-in-australian-medtech/
Govt looks for more foreign investment in Australian MedTech
Denham
Sadler
National Affairs Editor
7 June 2022
The federal government will look to attract more foreign investment in Australian medical technology companies with the help of consulting giant Deloitte.
Austrade recently awarded US-based multinational Deloitte a $120,000, two and a half month contract to develop an investment value proposition for Australia’s medical technology (MedTech) sector.
This will see the consulting firm deliver a report on how to attract more foreign investment in Australian companies in the sector.
“This contract is for Deloitte to work with Austrade to develop an investment value proposition for Australia’s MedTech sector that will help successfully attract further foreign direct investment into Australia,” an Austrade spokesperson told InnovationAus.com.
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https://www.innovationaus.com/mygov-untangling-the-govt-digital-service-hairball/
myGov: Untangling the govt digital service hairball
Glenn
Archer
Contributor
6 June 2022
The SMH published an article over the weekend that included some observations from the new Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten on his recent poor experiences using MyGov.
This caused me to reflect on government’s delivery of online services and how progress has waxed and waned over time. At the end of the day, myGov was envisaged as being the government’s primary service delivery site, allowing “people to carry out transactions with government in one place with a single login”.
Since 2016, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has been the business owner responsible for governance, strategy, policy and user experience of MyGov. Services Australia also shares some responsibilities for myGov, and in recent times has seen these expand.
However, the Australian government’s agenda for delivery of services via the internet can be traced back to the pronouncement by the Howard government in 1997 that it would make “all appropriate services available online via the Internet by 2001“.
While that was never achieved, it’s always useful to have a target and a timeframe.
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Impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning on nursing and midwifery
Cedar Yin CHIA, June 2022
Jun 10, 2022 |
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a relatively new discipline, beginning in the 1950s but gaining much attention in the last decade.
Developed by the interpenetration of many disciplines such as mathematical logic, fuzzy mathematics, computer science, cybernetics, information theory, management theory, physiology, psychology, linguistics and philosophy, AI is an emerging discipline in which new ideas, concepts, theories and technologies are constantly emerging, as well as a frontier discipline in development (Jones et al., 2018). Machine learning (ML) is a specific classification of AI that studies and develops computational algorithms that transform empirical data into complex relationships or patterns and help humans make accurate decisions (Wang & Summers, 2012). In other words, AI enables a machine to simulate human thinking capability and behaviour, whereas ML allows a machine to automatically learn from past data to make more accurate decisions without being programmed.
Currently, the advancement of AI is in full swing, and it has permeated almost every corner of the human economy, life and work. Research in AI has continued to grow at a rapid rate from 2010 to 2021, with an average annual growth rate of 33% in the number of papers on the subject (Zhang et al., 2022). This shows that even after more than two years of the epidemic, there has been no decline in AI advancement.
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Ed tech wrongfully tracked school children during pandemic: Human Rights Watch
A total of 89% of 164 government-endorsed education technologies were found to have endangered the privacy of children.
Globally, students who were required to use government-endorsed education technology (ed tech) during the COVID-19 pandemic had their contact, keystroke, and location data collected and sold to ad tech companies, according to the Human Rights Watch (HRW).
A total of 146 of 164 government-endorsed ed tech products endangered the privacy of children, with 199 third-party companies receiving personal data, the HRW said.
Further, only 35 endorsed vendors disclosed that user data would be collected for behavioural advertising, whilst a total of 23 products were developed with children as primary users in mind.
"In the absence of alternatives, children faced a singular choice whether they were aware of it or not: Attend school and use an ed tech product that infringes upon their privacy, or forgo the product altogether, be marked as absent, and be forced to drop out of school during the pandemic," the HRW wrote in its report How dare they peep into my private life.
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https://www.ausdoc.com.au/opinion/dear-hospitals-communication-doesnt-communicate-isnt-communication
Dear hospitals, a communication that doesn’t communicate isn’t a communication
9th June 2022
This is a plea to emergency and outpatient departments to take a long, hard look at how you communicate with GPs because it’s not getting any better; it’s just getting worse.
Let’s start with those letters that list a lot of tests and finish off with the cryptic note: “GP to follow up.”
Talk about kicking the can down the road.
I don’t take such letters lightly and have called many ED directors to point out the numerous issues there are with this ever-increasing practice.
I tell them that ringing from outside a hospital to get a result takes a huge amount of time, whereas a hospital employee can access the patient’s medical notes and look up the results directly.
I suggest that GPs are happy to take the responsibility for checking a patient's results if they’re emailed to us at the same time as they're added to the patient’s file.
“That’s impractical,” say the ED directors. “None of our staff have time to do that.”
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Let’s stop pretending the internet is a harmless virtual fairyland
Journalist
June 11, 2022 — 5.00am
Since the Federal Court ruled Twitter must release information that could reveal the identity of the person behind the high-profile account @PRGuy17 to right-wing commentator Avi Yemini, much of the commentary has been about who said what.
But as both a cyberhate expert and someone who has been a predator trolling victim, this is a distracting sideshow. It misses the heart of the matter.
Trolling covers a spectrum of behaviour, with mild pranks at one end and hate crimes at the other. And make no mistake, predator trolling – behaviours at the extreme end – use the internet to do real life harm. In New Zealand, the Christchurch killer murdered 51 people in March 2019. He was a predator troll on numerous levels. One tactic he skilfully and abhorrently employed is called “media f---ery” in the dark world of trolling.
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https://www.previousnext.com.au/case-studies/australian-digital-health-agency
Australian Digital Health Agency
Running Discovery
The Agency (ADHA) wanted to reposition itself to better support the needs of all Australians. We were approached to engage target users of the website in order to test and validate assumptions and provide recommendations for a new website. The outcome would more fully represent ADHA's vision, direction and Digital Strategy.
Digital health today
As technology advances and continues to shape our lives, the topic of “digital health” becomes more and more relevant to the everyday Australian — especially recently during COVID.
The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) is the Government Agency responsible for providing Australians with access to the growing number of digital health services available, including Telehealth, Electronic Prescriptions, My Health Record and more.
Getting the team aligned
Workshops are an effective tool for making big decisions, getting everyone on the same page and most importantly, finding somewhere to start. Understanding the project history, and how context and existing research impacts the goals and vision of the current project can often be the most paralysing part of the process.
A well-structured workshop helps the team navigate through these challenges by working together to identify what is important or relevant and where to focus energies.
Two of our most common workshops during discovery are the Purpose and Direction Workshop and the Design Studio.
==== Perspective from the ADHA Advertising Agency!
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Talking HealthTech
249 – Digital health strategies – Australia and beyond; Tjasa Zajc, Faces of Digital Health
Will the My Health Record ever become a valuable infrastructure? Peter Birch is the founder and host of the Talking HealthTech podcast and is one of the board members of…
June 9, 2022
249 - Digital health strategies - Australia and beyond; Tjasa Zajc, Faces of Digital Health
In this episode, you'll hear something slightly different; it's Pete getting interviewed by Tjasa Zajc on her podcast; Faces of Digital Health. Pete and Tjasa discuss the My Health Record (MyHR), which over twenty-three million Australians are currently using. They also explore the opt-in and out controversy surrounding MyHR, clinicians' ability to connect to the record and how that affects the record's completion status, including the populations being covered and much more.
My Health Record's Progress
My Health Record is undoubtedly an exciting piece of health tech solution, and it actually existed for quite a while but lacked the public's interest. It was introduced as a means of having a central health record for every Australian, and for good reasons too. However, a lot of information has to be loaded into the record, which relies on each person actually setting it up by going through an arduous process. Then, what do we actually do with this PDF format information?
MyHR then went from an opt-in to an opt-out system, which worked for a while until questions around data security and privacy came up from many concerned Australians. During COVID-19, much focus was placed on the MyHR since vaccines were administered, and the My Health Record was used as the place of reference for vaccine certificates.
As such, there was a massive uptake of the record; nonetheless, the challenge going forward will be to invest in additional use cases that more of the public would see as beneficial and Interesting.
==== Has some errors but asks the right question!
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https://www.afr.com/technology/six-cybersecurity-challenges-for-the-new-government-20220608-p5arz4
Six cybersecurity challenges for the new government
With a dedicated minister back in charge of the portfolio, the criical issue must be tackled because the risks will be diabolic when 5G connects just about everything to the internet.
Justin Bassi, Fergus Hanson and Danielle Cave
Jun 9, 2022 – 1.38pm
After nearly four years, the new government has reinstalled a dedicated minister for cybersecurity. Clare O’Neil will hold the reins, as well as running the (now slightly shrunk) mega agency of Home Affairs.
During the period cybersecurity has been without a dedicated minister, the cyber challenge has further exploded.
Getting departments, businesses, civil society and individuals to patch their computers and adopt basic protections is only the simplest aspect of cybersecurity (and it’s not that simple, as every secretary will no doubt inform the minister).
Cybersecurity has become a massive, cross-cutting portfolio. There is the policy arm in Home Affairs; there are the operational arms that encompass the Australian Signals Directorate (and the Australian Cyber Security Centre), the Australian Federal Police and AUSTRAC; and there is the international dimension that brings in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
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Ending the testimonial ban will not cure GPs' social media headaches: MDOs
MIGA and Avant have criticised the bill introduced by Queensland Minister for Health Yvette D'Ath
9th June 2022
Lifting AHPRA’s ban on patient testimonials will not ease the obligation on GP practices to police patient comments on their social media accounts, MDOs say.
A bill before Queensland's parliament would scrap the longstanding testimonial ban, which health ministers say has become unenforceable owing to the rise of social media and patient review websites.
If passed, the legislation will be adopted nationwide.
But MIGA has warned that, even under the new regime, doctors and practices would still be banned from using testimonials that create “unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment".
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Thought-control boost for paralysed thanks to groundbreaking medical device
5:18AM June 9, 2022
Paralysed patients have been given the ability to type on computers, communicate by text message and even undertake online banking and shopping thanks to a groundbreaking medical device that is implanted into the brain and allows an individual to control a digital device with their thoughts.
The implantable device known as the Stentrode has been developed by Australian medical technology company Synchron Inc, becoming the first brain-computer interface to gain the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration for permanent implants as part of a global trial.
It beats Elon Musk, who has been attempting to develop the same technology.
The stent-like device is implanted via the jugular vein and then fed up through blood vessels in a minimally invasive procedure to lodge inside the part of the brain that controls movement, the motor cortex. The Stentrode contains a network of tiny electrodes that record brain signals.
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Wednesday, 08 June 2022 15:33
50% of Gen Z respondents say they have control over personal data
GUEST RESEARCH: New report reveals Gen Z ranks online privacy as being ‘less important’ to them than other generations
Selligent Marketing Cloud, the omnichannel marketing and customer experience platform has released a report unpacking the critical issues brands need to address to effectively engage Generation Z (Gen Z) customers.
Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2010) is finally emerging in the consumer marketplace. Having grown up with more access to technology than any other generation before them, Gen Z sees technology as less of a “shiny” object and more of an extension of modern life.
As such, Gen Z’s relationship to data is also different, and privacy isn’t much of a priority. In fact, the report reveals that only half of Gen Z respondents say they have control over their personal data.
This generation is also rewriting the rules when it comes to consumer engagement in areas like technology, shopping, media and brand loyalty. The report finds:
- 75% of Gen Z respondents say they shop on smartphones, compared to 69% of millennials
- 49% of Gen Z respondents say they obtain news and information from YouTube, compared to 37% of millennials
- 55% of Gen Z respondents want to wait until the technology is proven to work before they adopt it, compared to 47% of millennials
Going forward, it’s vital marketers forge a new toolkit aimed at reaching and engaging with Gen Z exclusively. By learning and understanding this generation’s motivations, behaviours and preferences, they can better create strategies that drive this significant consumer segment to action.
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Video recording – Digital Transformation Tech Talk webinar 31 May 2022
At this webinar the speakers discussed aged care reform and how our digital transformation initiative is approaching co-design, partnering with the Australian Digital Health Agency, undertaking the development of future technical data models, and more.
1:30:43
Date published: 8 June 2022
Video type: Presentation
Description: Digital Transformation Tech Talk - webinar presentation
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Wednesday, 08 June 2022 11:15
Thinktank: Australians suffer from websites and apps showcasing ‘dark patterns’
Eighty-three percent of Australians have been negatively impacted by a website or app using harmful design features known as dark patterns, according to research by consumer thinktank Consumer Policy Research Centre.
Consumer Policy Research Centre (CPRC), in its report Duped by Design, identified ten types of deceptive designs ranging from features that embed hidden costs into a transaction to scarcity cues that create a sense of urgency that may not be accurate or even necessary.
“Our research clearly shows that dark patterns cause consumer harm. One in five Australians spent more than they intended and almost one in six felt pressured into buying something because of web or app designs,” explains CPRC CEO Erin Turner.
“We conducted a sweep of Australian websites and found some examples of web designs that appear to be clear breaches of the Australian Consumer Law,” Turner adds.
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Digital birth certificate holds key to ID verification problem: Dominello
By Justin Hendry on Jun 8, 2022 11:57AM
'A big reform, with national consequences'.
NSW digital minister Victor Dominello says Australia’s planned digital birth certificate is key to ensuring state and territory governments and businesses can verify digital identity credentials.
The state government has spent the last two years looking for a solution to allow its prized digital driver’s licence (DDL) to be accepted in a greater number of places.
Despite passing legislation to put the DDL on equal footing with traditional licences more than 18 months ago, businesses still require the plastic card in situations like buying a phone, hiring a car or taking out a loan.
After ditching an initial proposal for a 'copy solutiom' to allow businesses to take copies of the DDL, the government in late 2020 decided to work with the banks on a ‘validation solution’.
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Opinion: Sheryl Sandberg left a terrible legacy. Good riddance and goodbye
By Andrew Birmingham on Jun 2, 2022 8:15AM
Sheryl Sandberg retired from Meta today. Good riddance. For almost 14 years, she became obscenely wealthy helping to build a terrible company that helps terrible people do terrible things.
The people who know her best will be effusive in their praise, largely because she and Mark Zuckerberg made them hugely wealthy as well.
Everyone else, not so much.
Not so much, for instance, Atham-Lebbe Farsith, a waiter in a one-room curry house in Ampara, a town in Sri Lanka. He was beaten within an inch of his life by an angry mob whipped into a murderous frenzy by genocidal maniacs, who used Facebook’s monster-making machine to make monsters.
Not so much the villages of the Rohingya, slaughtered by the army of Myanmar after its soldiers were ordered to “kill all you see”, as we reported last year.
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https://medicalrepublic.com.au/scientists-are-building-robots-that-can-feel-pain/70552
6 June 2022
Scientists are building robots that can feel pain
Scientists have made artificial skin that can feel “pain” and say it’s laying the foundation for robots that can react to an ouchie just like humans do.
When they stabbed the palm of a fully-articulated, human-shaped robot hand with a metal stick, the robot recoiled “to protect the body from further damage”.
These Scottish engineers join a long line of boffins who are trying to make robots feel pain which, given the way we already abuse our computers when they stop working, seems like a short-sighted and slightly self-destructive hobby.
Nevertheless, the new attempt from the University of Glasgow team uses a type of electronic skin that copies the way the human brain’s neural pathway learns.
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Most Australians wary of sharing their data
3:20PM June 3, 2022
More than half of Australians are not comfortable sharing their consumer data with a third party and 94 per cent are uncomfortable with the way their data is collected and shared online.
A further 43 per cent simply reject the concept of sharing data with any kind of service provider, with 18 per cent not wanting to share their spending history, 12 per cent wishing to hide transactions and 10 per cent uncomfortable with sharing bank balances.
The findings come from a new study commissioned by Zepto, formerly Split Payments.
The company, which offers direct debit payments solutions, is on a mission to change the way consumers think about their data, says company head of customer experience James Harvey.
Mr Harvey believes data scepticism, which he says is largely a result of the mishandling of data by tech giants, is costing Australians a better deal on the likes of utility bills and bank lending.
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Secrets from the teals’ digital war room: we created a direct line to voters and now TV political ads are dead
June 6, 2022 — 5.00am
There’s one piece of negative feedback that every political campaigner loves hearing: “I’m sick of opening my phone and seeing your ads”.
It was frequent feedback we heard inside the “teal” independents’ digital war room as we served an unprecedented amount of advertising on social media to voters in the inner-city Liberal strongholds. All told, digital ads (on social media, YouTube, Google search or websites) promoting independents were seen more than 100 million times. The voters in Kooyong, for example, saw an online ad promoting Monique Ryan an average of 251 times each over the course of the campaign.
But this is just part of the story. To focus on raw numbers alone would be to miss the real reasons behind the success of the teal campaigns.
Below the iceberg is the story of an advertising campaign that borrowed from both corporate marketing and cutting-edge US political campaigns to upend several campaign orthodoxies in Australia. And it worked, beyond any pundit’s expectations, and despite the protestations of the Liberal Party via the media: that these seats were theirs, in Peta Credlin’s words, “by right”.
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https://medicalrepublic.com.au/could-ai-help-deliver-labors-aged-care-pledge/70332
6 June 2022
Could AI help deliver Labor’s aged care pledge?
Aged Care Political Technology TheHill
By Holly Payne
Round-the-clock nurses will be hard to deliver, but ‘guardian angel’ tech offers at-home alternatives.
Aged care facilities could soon have mandated minimum staffing levels and require at least one registered nurse to be on-site all 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But where will the staff come from?
While guaranteed staffing levels – plus a hefty wage increase – may be enough to convince some nurses to return to the struggling aged care industry, the growing proportion of elderly Australians makes this a tricky prospect.
Responding to an Australian Nursing & Midwifery Federation member poll in April, more than 3000 respondents indicated they would work in the aged care sector if there were a registered nurse on-site 24/7, guaranteed minimum staffing levels and decent wages.
In the lead-up to the election, Labor promised to implement the round-the-clock registered nurse requirement, as well as a requirement that every Australian in aged care will have 215 minutes of care per day.
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https://medicalrepublic.com.au/you-seek-the-holy-grail/70458
6 June 2022
You seek the Holy Grail?
That’s what interoperability will remain, unless the federal government steps up.
The new federal government is going to have its hands full attending to the health of the nation and ensuring, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pledged, that no person is left behind.
Aged care, the NDIS and public hospitals all require urgent attention, but let’s add another item to the list: the medical software industry is crying out for federal leadership and reform.
The inaugural Australasian CXO Cloud Healthcare Summit heard last week that while Australia talks the talk when it comes to data interoperability, when it comes to walking the walk, we have a long way to go.
Let’s take primary care as a case study. An estimated 6000 GP clinics and 15,000 specialist clinics are likely to operate more than 21,000 computers. Typically, these computers require secure, airconditioned rooms, off-site back-up systems, on-call IT support teams and software installations including but not limited to:
- An IHI adaptor to support the My Health Record and e-prescribing
- eRx medication dispensing software
- Secure messaging legacy systems (7+ vendors)
- Booking engines such as HotDoc or HealthEngine
- Data extractor such as Polar or Pen
- Research tools – NPS or other
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David.
