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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 any 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, and found interesting.
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https://www.innovationaus.com/sleeptites-remi-claims-digital-health-health-tech-award/
Sleeptite’s REMi claims Digital Health & Health Tech Award
Denham
Sadler
National Affairs Editor
17 November 2022
Melbourne startup Sleeptite has won the Digital Health and Health Tech category at the InnovationAus 2022 Awards for Excellence for its innovative monitoring technology assisting in the aged care sector.
The InnovationAus 2022 Awards for Excellence were presented on Thursday night at a gala black-tie dinner at the Cutaway in Sydney’s Barangaroo district.
Digital health has experienced unprecedented growth in light of the COVID pandemic, and the willingness of Australians to adopt these technologies in terms of healthcare has increased exponentially.
This category celebrated some of the pioneering digital health and health tech companies in Australia.
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https://www.innovationaus.com/innovationaus-awards-digital-health-health-tech-award/
InnovationAus Awards: Digital Health & Health Tech Award
Denham
Sadler
National Affairs Editor
15 November 2022
The last two and a half years have demonstrated the importance of constant innovations and technological developments in the health and medical sectors.
Digital health and health-tech startups have grown in prominence throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, and there’s never been more funding on offer to positive solutions improving the health of communities.
There are also ongoing concerns for ageing, child mortality, pandemics and the impact of poverty and racial discrimination on access to healthcare, and technology often offers the solution to this.
The InnovationAus 2022 Award for Excellence in Digital Health & Health Tech celebrates digital health platforms and related technological innovations such as devices, diagnostics and therapeutics and MedTech and BioTech innovation.
The finalists in this category are:
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https://www.croakey.org/why-australia-needs-a-national-strategy-to-tackle-misinformation/
Why Australia needs a national strategy to tackle misinformation
Jennifer Doggett
Thursday, November 17, 2022
Introduction by Croakey: Speaking on the eve of the G20 Summit in Bali, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for leadership to address the public health threat of disinformation spread by Big Tech.
“Powerful tech companies are running roughshod over human rights and personal privacy and providing platforms for deadly disinformation, in pursuit of profit,” he said.
“Let’s be clear: disinformation kills. Undermining public health kills and these are life-and-death issues.”
Guterres proposed a Global Digital Compact and a global code of conduct that promotes integrity in public communications as well as information literacy.
This call for international action is timely for Australia where last week in Senate Estimates three federal Senators pursued lines of questioning seemingly lifted straight from a COVID conspiracy theorist’s playbook.
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https://digitalhealth.org.au/blog/advancing-workforce-capability-healthcare-in-a-digital-society/
Advancing workforce capability: Healthcare in a digital society
Nov 17, 2022 | Advocacy, AIDH news, Australian Health News, Community of Practice, Workforce
Greg Moran CHIA
Australia needs a health and social care workforce with a strong digital health capability if it is to deliver consumer-centred services now and into the future. The Australasian Institute of Digital Health has a long-standing commitment to workforce advancement and called it out as a key priority towards achieving its vision of ‘healthier lives, digitally enabled’.
The Institute is already working with many health professions on workforce advancement through accreditation and training, with programs focusing on digital health basics to more advanced workforce-based programs aiming to build capability across the health sector.
By
fostering collaboration and cross-partnerships, our strategy is to take digital
health out to every healthcare professional, whatever level of knowledge they
may have as a starting point,
When the Institute held its Digital Health Summit in Sydney (October 2022) it
was a prime opportunity to make workforce capability and development a central
theme. More than 1,100 delegates from across the digital health community
considered some of the key issues facing our health workforce, including talent
attraction and retention; upskilling and education; and awareness of digital
health career pathways.
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https://digitalhealth.org.au/blog/the-shadow-pandemic-violence-against-women-during-covid-19/
The Shadow Pandemic: Violence against women during COVID-19
Nov 18, 2022 | Community Chats, Community of Practice, Nursing & Midwifery Informatics, Patient Safety
Dr Helen Almond FAIDH
Senior Lecturer, Australian Institute of Health Service Management, College of Business and Economics (COBE), University of Tasmania
The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 resulted in lockdowns and stay-at-home mandates in over 90 countries (Majumdar & Wood, 2020). Emerging data from front line health and support services reported that during this period, violence against women had increased (Viero et al., 2021). This alarming crisis and human rights violation has been labelled ‘The Shadow Pandemic’ by the World Health Organization and United Nations (UN). While all types of violence against women have seen an increase in Australia, domestic violence or intimate partner violence was most pronounced, and includes physical violence, emotional abuse, sexual violence, financial abuse, and coercive control (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2020).
Prior to the pandemic, globally one in three women experienced physical or sexual violence, mostly from an intimate partner. A 10-27% increase in reported domestic violence was observed across 4 US states in 2020 (Boserup, McKenney & Ekbuli, 2020). The increase in violence against women has had a disproportionate impact on women with disabilities due to dependence on perpetrators and the denial of essential living activities within the household (Majumdar & Wood, 2020).
Several factors contributed to the global rise of reported violence against women. Firstly, health and social support systems underwent significant strain. In some countries, resources were diverted from violence against women response and support, and directed towards COVID-19 relief efforts (UN Women, 2022).
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Meta staff, security guards fired for hijacking user accounts
By Kirsten Grind and Robert Mcmillan
Dow Jones
5:17AM November 18, 2022
Meta Platforms Inc. has fired or disciplined more than two dozen employees and contractors over the last year whom it accused of improperly taking over user accounts, in some cases allegedly for bribes, according to people familiar with the matter and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Some of those fired were contractors who worked as security guards stationed at Meta facilities and were given access to the Facebook parent’s internal mechanism for employees to help users having trouble with their accounts, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter.
The mechanism, known internally as “Oops,” has existed since Facebook’s early years as a means for employees to help users they know who have forgotten their passwords or emails, or had their accounts taken over by hackers.
As part of the alleged abuse of the system, Meta says that in some cases workers accepted thousands of dollars in bribes from outside hackers to access user accounts, the people and documents say.
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Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await its collapse
Joseph Menn and Cat Zakrzewski
Nov 19, 2022 – 10.33am
San Francisco | New Twitter owner Elon Musk summoned all employees who “actually write software” to a Friday afternoon (Saturday AEDT) summit at the company’s San Francisco headquarters as he plots next moves amid a chaotic exodus of hundreds of employees.
He also tweeted new content moderation policies, saying that hate speech would see its distribution limited and that a handful of controversial accounts had been restored, but not that of former President Donald Trump.
The series of emails and tweets underscored the ad hoc nature of Musk’s oversight of a social media platform that has 237 million daily users, many of whom tweeted their concerns in the last 24 hours that Twitter is about to collapse - something experts said was a likely eventuality though not necessarily imminent.
Musk’s emails to engineers, however, suggested concern inside Twitter that a crisis was in the making. The emails even went out to staffers who’d walked out on Thursday rather than sign a pledge to work “long hours at high intensity”.
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ASIC starts planning for its crypto crackdown
9:17PM November 16, 2022
Shortly before the May election the corporate regulator started to quietly build up its internal muscle around crypto currencies, even though it doesn’t have a legal mandate from Canberra to regulate the high tech sector
ASIC has been training investigators and working through the legal minefield of bitcoin, ethereum and other digital assets while it marks out the boundaries of the largely unregulated sector. It is also testing where it can quickly step in and act.
ASIC chairman Joe Longo has nominated crypto among his list of priorities and this has put it in the game when it comes investigating fallout from the $US32bn ($47.2bn) collapse of crypto exchange FTX. Administrator KordaMentha is piecing together what is left in the Australian offshoot which could see up to 30,000 Australian investors face heavy losses, and this is being closely watched by ASIC.
It comes as the regulator is also shortly expected to make a final decision on whether to make a full stop order on crypto asset manager Holon investments. Last month ASIC issued an interim stop order against Holon, preventing it to market three funds to retail investors because it wasn’t taking into account their financial objectives.
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https://medicalrepublic.com.au/where-is-the-medicare-leakage-coming-from-gps-point-the-finger/81587
18 November 2022
Where is the Medicare ‘leakage’ coming from? GPs point the finger
Many GPs think large, profit-driven corporates and hospitals are the main sources of Medicare misuse, according to a Healthed survey.
Last week, Healthed asked around 350 GPs what they thought were the main causes of Medicare misuse. Their answers suggest a more complex picture than the simplistic ideas put forward in recent mainstream news reports, which focused almost exclusively on waste and fraud by GPs, and hence the “greedy doctor” trope, as the main sources of Medicare “misuse”.
In the survey, Healthed asked GPs:
“If there are Medicare funds being inappropriately used, where do you suspect the main ‘misuse’ or ‘leakage’ is?” GPs could select multiple options, and could also provide their own responses.
Around 40% of GPs surveyed identified over-billing and over-servicing by profit-driven GP organisations as a leading source of leakage.
Around a quarter of GPs (27%) identified state-funded hospital outpatient services as the main “misuse” of Medicare. These outpatient services are nominally already funded by the relevant state government.
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‘They were building a Frankenstein’: how ASX’s blockchain unravelled
James Eyers Senior Reporter
Nov 17, 2022 – 3.41pm
When Elmer Funke Kupper jumped on the blockchain bandwagon in early 2016, announcing ASX would invest in New York-based start-up Digital Asset to deploy the emerging technology in an upgrade to the market’s clearing and settlement system, his intentions were good.
At the time, the ASX CEO figured a distributed ledger, similar to the technology underpinning the bitcoin cryptocurrency, would allow ASX to create a “single source of truth” around equity ownership to make the market more efficient.
It promised to streamline a multitude of complex processes connecting listed companies and their investors in the equity market by allowing everyone to see who owns a particular stock at any point in time.
The system could help reduce some of the $4 billion to $5 billion it costs to run the equities markets each year, Funke Kupper explained to The Australian Financial Review Business Summit in 2016.
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https://wildhealth.net.au/is-medtwitter-really-leaving-twitter/
17 November 2022
Is #medTwitter really leaving Twitter?
The great Twitter migration may happen, but doctors and health experts feel a pull to stay on the platform despite its flaws.
Over the course of the pandemic, both healthcare workers and researchers have gained very significant followings on the network, from colleagues and the general public alike.
This group is loosely known as #medTwitter – former deputy chief medical officer Dr Nick Coatsworth even namechecked it in a recent Sydney Morning Herald piece, in which he called it the “medical left”.
Billionaire Elon Musk recently bought the platform, immediately laying off roughly half of its staff and outlining a plan for users to pay in order to have their account “verified”.
Verified users have their content algorithmically boosted.
Given Mr Musk’s history of erratic actions via the platform and his interesting relationship with free speech – not to mention the fact that the cash-for-verification system was immediately exploited by bad-faith actors – there’s a sense that Twitter may be about to take a turn for the worse.
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Deliveroo Australia collapses, leaving 15,000 riders without work
Patrick Durkin BOSS Deputy editor
Updated Nov 16, 2022 – 6.49pm, first published at 6.02pm
Deliveroo has announced the end of its operations in Australia and been placed into voluntary administration, leaving 120 staff and 15,000 riders without work and another 12,000 restaurants in the lurch.
Led by former Powershop Australia boss Ed McManus, the food delivery company was placed into voluntary administration late on Wednesday and ceased trading, with Michael Korda, Andrew Knight and Craig Shepard appointed as voluntary administrators.
Deliveroo – listed on the London Stock Exchange – launched in Australia in 2015 with headquarters in Melbourne, and recently expanded into grocery delivery with partners BP and EzyMart.
The UK-founded platform, founded by William Shu and backed by ecommerce giant Amazon, said the decision was driven by a “disciplined approach to capital allocation” and denied that federal government reforms to the gig economy played a role.
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KKR backs Aussie robotics company in blockbuster $108m raise
Yolanda Redrup Reporter
Nov 17, 2022 – 9.35am
Renowned US private equity fund KKR has joined the register of robotics and navigation technology company Advanced Navigation as part of a new $108 million funding round.
It is one of the largest venture capital raises for an Australian company since the tech correction hit. The business is one of few companies able to raise more than $100 million amid the tight funding market conditions.
Advanced Navigation could not disclose the valuation of the raise, but it is understood co-founders Xavier Orr and Chris Shaw gave up a standard 10 per cent to 15 per cent of equity under the deal, meaning the company is approaching the lauded unicorn status (a $1 billion valuation).
KKR’s investment is a divergence from its typical PE-style deals, and is the first investment in an Australian company from its Next Generation Technology Growth funds.
Mr Orr told The Australian Financial Review former prime minister and Advanced Navigation investor and director Malcolm Turnbull had introduced KKR to the company.
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ASX kills its blockchain project, will write off $250 million
James Eyers Senior Reporter
Nov 17, 2022 – 8.49am
ASX has dumped its controversial blockchain project that would have replaced its ageing CHESS settlement and clearing system, after a devastating report from Accenture identified a range of problems, including uncertain timelines, communication issues with technology vendor Digital Asset and excessive complexity.
ASX will write off $245 million to $255 million pre-tax in costs associated with the project, which has dragged on for seven years.
In a devastating blow to the credibility of the exchange and to distributed ledger technology more broadly, the independent report by Accenture highlighted significant gaps and deficiencies with the design of the system and ASX’s ability to deliver it.
Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe described the ASX announcement as “very disappointing”.
The Accenture report was commissioned in August after the project’s fifth delay. ASX has now gone back to a “solution design” stage for CHESS replacement and will reassess all options to create a new clearing and settlement system while maintaining the legacy infrastructure.
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https://www.themandarin.com.au/205355-right-data-help-overcome-policy-challenges/
How the right data can help overcome policy challenges
By Stuart Ridley 16-Nov-2022
There’s a wealth of data already helping agencies deliver improved services. And rapid adoption of digital technologies by Australians during the pandemic has helped increase the quantity and quality of data available to support decisions.
But as former Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) head David Kalisch argues, more can be done with data to help policymakers do their jobs better.
“There’s more data at people’s disposal now, though for many years it was probably hit and miss as to whether agencies were collecting enough information – and the right information – to assess the full impact of programs,” Kalisch says.
“In the 1990s, governments put a lot of focus on evaluating major programs, and then it fell away. My sense is this directly relates to the way politics is being played in Australia; there is now increased sensitivity to programs or policies that can be pointed out as failures or not as successful as they’ve been claimed to be.
“Now, there have been some good signals from the incoming government around boosting the evaluation of policies and programs. If they want to save money from stopping ineffective programs, or make improvements, then data is a way to find out.”
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AI-backed platform to use cancer patient data
Tuesday, 15 November, 2022
Cancer research, education and treatment centre Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Peter Mac) will trial an end-to-end digital platform to securely capture and store its comprehensive pool of de-identified patient data. The trial aims to support innovative research and development and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
The project, coordinated by the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC), pairs Peter Mac with global AI healthcare specialist Max Kelsen to test their AI-based data information platform.
The highly secure data platform will enable a patient outcome focused aggregation of previously disparate and siloed datasets, spanning each patient’s diagnosis, treatment and post-treatment journey.
Swinburne University of Technology is the research partner for the three-year project.
Associate Professor Kate Burbury, Director of Digital and Healthcare Innovations at Peter Mac, said the unique collaboration across academia, healthcare and commercial organisations represents a potentially transformative digital healthcare project.
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https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cae2a2f8-9d3c-4ec5-ac64-69eaf97f7b25
Wearable technology becomes skin deep
Gilbert + Tobin - Peter Waters
Australia November 14 2022
Wearable technologies, like the Apple Watch, have been ‘standard issue’ for many of us, but the current technology has its limits. Japanese and US researchers have now developed stretchable/flexible sensors, batteries and transmitters that can be assembled into a wireless ‘smart skin’. This technology will open new horizons in precision, and remote, medicine.
Shortcomings of current wearables
Current commercial wearables are good at monitoring our heart rate or blood oxygen levels by photoplethysmography (PPG), our heart’s electrical activity by electrocardiography (ECG), and body activities such as exercise, sleep, and stress levels.
But strapped usually to your wrist, the area of skin contact is limited and the device is monitoring your body from the body’s periphery. This can mean that some of their readings are not as accurate as they could be if the skin exposure area was larger or the device was affixed more closely to the body’s core.
While engineered to a relatively small physical size, the wearable is still rigid and bulky. It can bounce around on the body during physical activity, breaking the interface (through the skin) with the body, which further reduces the accuracy of its data readings.
There are also many people who find current wearables uncomfortable or distracting, including children and people with dementia.
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OAIC submission to the Productivity Commission’s 5-year Productivity Inquiry: Australia’s data and digital dividend Interim Report
14 November 2022
Introduction
- The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to the 5-year Productivity Inquiry: Australia’s data and digital dividend Interim Report (the Report) released by the Productivity Commission (the Commission) on 23 August 2022. The Report examines the role that data and digital tools and applications can play in Australia’s productivity growth.
- The OAIC is an independent Commonwealth regulator, established to bring together three functions: privacy functions (protecting the privacy of individuals under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act), freedom of information (FOI) functions (access to information held by the Commonwealth Government in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) (FOI Act)), and information management functions (as set out in the Information Commissioner Act 2010 (Cth)).
- Promoting and upholding privacy and information access rights and supporting the proactive release of government-held information are key strategic priorities for the OAIC.[1] This recognises that data held by the Australian Government is a valuable national resource that can yield significant benefits for the Australian public when handled appropriately and in the public interest.
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https://medicalrepublic.com.au/digital-media-is-not-a-mans-best-friend/81248
14 November 2022
Digital media is not a man’s best friend
By Penny Durham
Men are advised to look beyond YouTube and TikTok for information on prostate screening.
Devastating news if you get all your medical advice from TikTok and YouTube (although you’ll see the AMA are onto it if you’ve read today’s health lit story).
A team subjected themselves to watching the 50 most popular prostate screening-related videos in English on each of the two platforms, and analysed them for the presence of: recommendations for high-risk racial/ethnic cohorts, recommendations for family history of prostate cancer, prostate-specific antigen testing, blood tests other than PSA, genomic testing, digital rectal examination, age-specific screening recommendations, magnetic resonance imaging of the prostate for screening and targeted/fusion prostate biopsy.
The result was an emphatic thumbs down: “Overall, there were no videos that contained both high-quality and accurate information.”
YouTube fared slightly better than TikTok on some criteria, such as discussion of both the pros and cons of prostate cancer screening, and rated better on understandability and actionability. YouTube videos were “significantly more likely to contain accurate information relative to screening guidelines” – that is 12% compared with TikTok’s zero.
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https://medicalrepublic.com.au/medical-misinformation-must-be-taken-to-task-ama/81245
14 November 2022
Medical misinformation must be taken to task: AMA
By Holly Payne
The opportunity to combat social media misinformation and disinformation using the coming National Health Literacy Strategy is too good to squander, the association says.
A new strategy set to target the 60% of Australians who are unable to fully understand commonly seen health information doesn’t do enough to target digital media, according to the AMA.
“We know the government does want to do what it can to improve health literacy and to make sure that health messages are getting out clearly,” AMA vice-president Dr Danielle McMullen said.
“But government bodies can sometimes get stuck in pen and paper and we are encouraging them to do more online.”
The National Health Literacy Strategy is one of the eight priority areas of the National Preventive Health Strategy and is based on the idea that a poor understanding of health leads to poor access to healthcare, lower uptake of services and worse patient outcomes.
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WearOptimo lifesaving device is a potential life saver
4:08PM November 13, 2022
A small wearable sensor being developed by a Brisbane health tech firm has the potential to pick up the early warning signs of heart attack, dehydration and other deadly conditions.
WearOptimo is pioneering next-generation wearables that attach microelectrodes just under the skin to tap into biomarkers that surface monitors cannot measure.
The sensors have the potential to replace frequent blood tests and invasive implantable monitors to identify early indications of everything from heart attack to dehydration.
WearOptimo chief executive and founder Professor Mark Kendall said the company recently received a $5m boost from investors that will allow clinical trials to begin at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
Professor Kendall said the trials will initially focus on a game-changing hydration monitor that could be used across the mining, aged care, construction and sport sectors where dehydration can have a major impact on health but be notoriously difficult to monitor.
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Latest data breach report shows privacy risks; Medibank update
Friday, 11 November, 2022
Recent data breaches and the findings of the latest ‘Notifiable data breaches’ report stress the need for organisations to have robust information-handling practices and an up-to-date data breach response plan.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) was notified of 396 data breaches from January to June 2022, a 14% decrease compared to July to December 2021.
Despite the overall fall in notifications, the data trended upwards in the later part of the period, which has continued, said the OAIC. The report also draws attention to an increase in larger-scale breaches and breaches affecting multiple entities in the reporting period.
There were 24 data breaches reported to affect 5000 or more Australians, four of which were reported to affect 100,000 or more Australians. All but one of these 24 breaches were caused by cybersecurity incidents.
“The number of larger-scale breaches caused by cybersecurity incidents reiterates the importance of entities having measures in place to protect, detect and respond to the range of cyber threats in the environment,” said Australian Information and Privacy Commissioner Angela Falk.
Of the total data breaches, health service providers notified 79 (20%) data breaches and 33% of data breaches involved health information.
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David.
