It Seems Every Time We Have A New Health Minister They Drink The myHealth Record Kool-Aide!

This interview appeared last week:

Television interview with Assistant Minister Kearney on ABC News - 15 February 2024

Read the transcript from Assistant Minister Kearney's interview on online health services and voluntary assisted dying laws.

The Hon Ged Kearney MP
Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care

Media event date: 15 February 2024

Date published: 16 February 2024

Media type: Transcript

Audience: General public

GREG JENNETT, ABC NEWS: Now, there aren't many people around the Parliament who aren't offering best wishes to Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister, and his partner Jodie Haydon after their engagement. Love, after all, crosses all political divides. Joy in the occasion is also shared by the Assistant Health Minister, Ged Kearney. We spoke to her starting out on the prime ministerial engagement.
 
[Excerpt]
 
Ged Kearney, welcome back to Afternoon Briefing. It's nice to have you with us here in the studio.
 
GED KEARNEY, ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE: [Talks over] Thanks, Greg.
 
JENNETT: I'm going to get to things in the health portfolio very, very quickly, I promise, but can't go past the fact that the Prime Minister and Jodie Haydon have announced their engagement. As far as we know, the first prime ministerial engagement slash wedding in office that we've ever had in this country. Makes it a pretty special day.
 
KEARNEY: Oh, it really does. And who knew the Prime Minister was such a romantic, doing it on Valentine's Day? It's a great announcement. We're all so happy for them. They're a gorgeous couple and we look forward to the wedding.

……

KEARNEY: Well, since we've been elected, we have injected over $1 billion into the digital health sector. It's an area that we think we have to really take up because it will, I think, advance health care dramatically for patients, which is really what we're here for. So, for example, we're finding that the uptake of My Health Record – something that we are very serious about expanding if we can – has been phenomenal. We've had a 40 per cent increase in the last year of records that have been uploaded into-
 
JENNETT: [Interrupts] What do you put that down to? Because there was an initial reluctance.
 
KEARNEY: There was an initial reluctance. I think there's a couple of things. I think during COVID, people got quite used to seeing health results digitally. I think that's part of it. But even more importantly, is that we now have about 99 per cent of GPs actually engaging with My Health Records, uploading patients’ results and treatment onto it, and encouraging their patients to use the My Health Record. It's so good. When I was a nurse, we used old paper files and they got lost. They got scribbled on, they got torn up, they got things spilt on them. You know, it was terribly inefficient. Having it all on your phone or in a digital record, I think, is so much more efficient and will certainly aid patient treatment.
 
JENNETT: It does seem to be accelerating after a pretty sluggish start in this country. Ged Kearney, I might just take you to one other area that's kind of related to digital health services. It's an anomaly that's been highlighted by Kate Chaney and oncologists this week on this program and in the Parliament. Now that we've got voluntary assisted dying laws in each Australian state, either in place or coming, it remains a criminal offence for a doctor to provide advice or consultations using a carriage service. That's the legal term, but to you and me, a phone or internet connection. The age-old reason being that it might have promoted suicide. It's viewed differently through voluntary assisted dying laws now. Is that an anomaly? Is that what the Government views it as and what will it do about it?
 
……

Here is the link:

https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-ged-kearney-mp/media/television-interview-with-assistant-minister-kearney-on-abc-news-15-february-2024?language=en

Again we have a new Minister who thinks it is wonderful that all these records are being uploaded to the myHR and takes that as a measure of success!

That many of these uploads are totally automated and that there is no information on how many of these uploads are actually being referenced or used seems to be of no relevance!

The update on usage of the myHR is found here:

https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/my-health-record/statistics

In the Jan 2024 Update we find there are 1.2 Billion documents in the system.

Of those 507K are from consumers.

Consumer usage seems to slowing a little with 6 million data views in January. Sadly it is unclear just what data is being viewed.

GP, Aged Care and specialist use of the myHR still seems pretty low.

We still have no measure of the clinical impact of the myHR sadly.

I have no idea why the Minister thinks all this is great! I wonder does she think the $400M per annum spent on the myHR is value for money?

My view is still that the myHR is a useless lemon. Comment if you disagree with reasons!

David.

I Wonder What Will Come Next In The World Of Social Media?

This appeared last week and encouraged me to wonder where we are going with social media:

Facebook is 20. It still hasn’t grown up

David Swan

Technology Editor

February 11, 2024 — 5.00am

Facebook has turned 20.

The social media company that began life in 2004 as a “hot or not” website from 19-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, eventually growing into a $1 trillion behemoth, would now be old enough to legally, in Australia at least, drink and smoke if it were a person.

Some say Facebook is the new tobacco: an addictive substance that doles out regular dopamine hits – in Facebook’s case in the form of “likes” and comments – with severe negative health consequences, particularly for young people.

It’s arguably worse and, like smoking, we likely won’t know the true impact for decades.

The story of Facebook’s first 20 years is one of initial promise and optimism being replaced over its evolution by rampant privacy intrusions, misinformation and an overall malaise that has long dogged the company, though not its share price.

Facebook’s decline – setting aside its eye-watering valuation – is symptomatic of the ruination of everything we once loved about the internet.

It has fallen victim to “enshittification”, a term coined by the writer and futurist Cory Doctorow to describe the decay of online platforms. As Doctorow put it: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Nearly every online service you can think of – Twitter, Reddit, Google search and Bandcamp – are now shadows of their former selves thanks to enshittification, and Facebook is arguably the poster child.

Facebook was once a far more friendly, fun and innocent place to spend time online. It was a simpler platform, and it was good to its users. Its feed was filled with inane status updates (everyone must know what I just had for dinner), tedious photos of said dinner, and general life updates including new jobs and successful marriage proposals.

Its premise was simple: to be a place to connect with your friends and family online. It could be a time suck, sure, but a time suck without the toxicity and rampant misinformation that we have now.

But gradually Facebook changed. What began as a tool for connection became a hub of division and unforseen consequences. The feed became increasingly flooded with advertising, fake news and abuse. When their parents joined, many users – in particular those aged 18 to 30 – left the platform altogether, flocking instead to cooler platforms like TikTok, or switching to group chats and texting.

While Facebook’s first decade was largely successful, its second has seen it deteriorate in the face of scandal after scandal. The company has failed at every hurdle to accept responsibility for the content posted on its platform and, even two decades in, has not proven it can be trusted to act in the best interests of its users.

In 2012, the company conducted experiments on around 70,000 users without their consent, removing certain words from their newsfeeds to test how it affected their reactions to posts. It took two years for those experiments to be made public.

Nearly 10 years later, in 2021, employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before US Congress that the company puts profits over safety. Haugen helped release the so-called “Facebook Papers” which detailed the platform’s fading popularity with teenagers and its inability to counter hate speech.

That same year, Facebook blocked the pages of Australian charities, health organisations and government services during a pandemic and raging bushfires, all to protest a law that would force it to compensate local publishers for news.

And, in 2022, the company paid a whopping $1.1 billion to finally settle legal action relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their personal data released en masse to third parties without consent.

Facebook’s algorithms, which remain shrouded in secrecy, have often fed our worst tendencies, encouraging everything from home decor envy to political extremism and violence, as has been seen in the US and Myanmar.

Earlier this month, it became apparent just how unrecognisable Facebook is now from its 2004 self. In front of the US Senate Committee, Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley executives were forced to face parents holding photographs of their dead children, who were victims of online sexual exploitation and cyberbullying.

Senators were united across the aisle about the damage done by the likes of Facebook to the health and wellbeing of children.

“They’re responsible for many of the dangers our children face online,” the judiciary committee’s chairman, Democrat Dick Durbin said. “Their design choices, their failures to adequately invest in trust and safety, their constant pursuit of engagement and profit over basic safety have all put our kids and grandkids at risk.”

Republican Senator Josh Hawley – who couldn’t be more different politically from Durbin – also repeatedly criticised Zuckerberg.

“Your product is killing people,” he told the executive.

More here:

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/facebook-is-20-it-still-hasn-t-grown-up-20240206-p5f2q6.html

I think it is fair to say most of the social media platforms have become unrecognisable over the period since they opened  for use and that since then huge numbers of users have left – myself included – due to the unappealing way the platforms seem to work and the dominance of all sorts of unwanted advertising and other unwanted influences.

All the platforms seem to have mostly lost the ‘social’ aspect of their operations and many are now ‘no fun’ to use anymore, and have lost track of their core purpose.

To me the question is what can come next and attract users while fostering more interested and useful behaviour! I am sure the platform is out there already but that not many have noticed so far! It will be interesting to see what emerges over the next decade or so.

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 734 – Results – 18 February, 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

On Balance, Has Facebook Been A Force For Good Or Evil Over The Last 20 Years?

Good                                                                         6 (21%)

Evil                                                                          15 (59%)

I Have No Idea                                                         5 (20%)

Total No. Of Votes: 26

A split vote with a majority seeing evil as the dominant outcome!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

An OK number of votes. But also a very clear outcome! 

5 of 26 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

Not Digital Health But A Story Like This Really Does Lift The Spirits And Engender Hope.

This appeared a few days ago:

AI helps scholars read scroll buried when Vesuvius erupted in AD79

Science

Researchers used AI to read letters on papyrus scroll damaged by the blast of heat, ash and pumice that destroyed Pompeii

Ian Sample Science editor @iansample

Tue 6 Feb 2024 01.07 AEDT Last modified on Tue 6 Feb 2024 13.31 AEDT

Scholars of antiquity believe they are on the brink of a new era of understanding after researchers armed with artificial intelligence read the hidden text of a charred scroll that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago.

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls held in the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum were burned to a crisp when the town was devastated by the intense blast of heat, ash and pumice that destroyed nearby Pompeii in AD79.

Excavations in the 18th century recovered more than 1,000 whole or partial scrolls from the mansion, thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, but the black ink was unreadable on the carbonised papyri and the scrolls crumbled to pieces when researchers tried to open them.

The breakthrough in reading the ancient material came from the $1m Vesuvius Challenge, a contest launched in 2023 by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Silicon Valley backers. The competition offered prizes for extracting text from high-resolution CT scans of a scroll taken at Diamond, the UK’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire.

On Monday, Nat Friedman, a US tech executive and founding sponsor of the challenge, announced that a team of three computer-savvy students, Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland, had won the $700,000 (£554,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 Greek letters from the scroll.

Papyrologists who have studied the text recovered from the blackened scroll were stunned at the feat. “This is a complete gamechanger,” said Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at Bristol University and chair of the Herculaneum Society. “There are hundreds of these scrolls waiting to be read.”

Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, added: “This is the start of a revolution in Herculaneum papyrology and in Greek philosophy in general. It is the only library to come to us from ancient Roman times.”

“We are moving into a new era,” said Seales, who led efforts to read the scrolls by virtually unwrapping the CT images and training AI algorithms to detect the presence of ink. He now wants to build a portable CT scanner to image scrolls without moving them from their collections.

In October, Farritor won the challenge’s $40,000 “first letters” prize when he identified the ancient Greek word for “purple”, in the scroll. He teamed up with Nader in November, with Schilliger, who developed an algorithm to automatically unwrap CT images, joining them days before the contest deadline on 31 December. Together they read more than 2,000 letters of the scroll, giving scholars their first real insight into its contents.

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey,” said Youssef. “The adrenaline rush is what kept us going. It was insane. It meant working 20-something hours a day. I didn’t know when one day ended and the next day started.”

“It probably is Philodemus,” Fowler said of the author. “The style is very gnarly, typical of him, and the subject is up his alley.” The scroll discusses sources of pleasure, touching on music and food – capers in particular – and whether the pleasure experienced from a combination of elements owes to the major or minor constituents, the abundant or the scare. “In the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” the author writes.

“I think he’s asking the question: what is the source of pleasure in a mix of things? Is it the dominant element, is it the scarce element, or is it the mix itself?” said Fowler. The author ends with a parting shot against his philosophical adversaries for having “nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or particular”.

More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/05/ai-helps-scholars-read-scroll-buried-when-vesuvius-erupted-in-ad79

It is wonderful to think of the scrolls being read and adding to our knowledge of a time really long past!

I hope we get more that shopping lists or the like!

David.

Now This Article Really Managed To Clarify My Fuzzy Thinking!

This appeared last week:

It really is the knowledge workers who AI will threaten! 

Bankers, lawyers and tech workers most likely to be in AI firing line
By Steve Lohr

February 11, 2024 — 5.08am

A new generation of artificial intelligence is poised to turn old assumptions about technology on their head.

For years, people working in warehouses or fast-food restaurants worried that automation could eliminate their jobs. But new research suggests that generative AI – the kind used in chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – will have its biggest impact on white-collar workers with high-paying jobs in industries such as banking and tech.

A report published Thursday by the Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit research centre, and SHRM (formerly the Society for Human Resource Management), stops short of saying the technology will do away with large numbers of jobs.

But it makes clear that workers need to better prepare for a future in which AI could play a significant role in many workplaces that until now have been largely untouched by technological disruption.

For people in tech, it means they may be building their AI replacements.

“There’s no question the workers who will be impacted most are those with college degrees, and those are the people who always thought they were safe,” said Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute.

Corporations and governments are going to have to seriously invest to get ahead of this.

For hundreds of corporations, the researchers estimated the share of payroll spending that goes to workers employed in the 200 occupations most likely to be affected by generative AI. Many of those jobs are held by affluent college graduates, including business analysts, marketing managers, software developers, database administrators, project managers and lawyers.

Companies in finance, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, have some of the highest percentages of their payrolls likely to be disrupted by generative AI. Not far behind are tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Meta.

Getting AI to do human work could result in big savings for those companies. The research estimates that banks and some tech companies spend 60 to 80 per cent of their payrolls, or more, on workers in occupations most likely to be affected by the new technology.

Editor's pick

The retail, restaurant and transportation industries are least likely to be affected by generative AI, the report found. Companies like Walmart, McDonald’s and Delta Air Lines mostly employ workers without college degrees who perform roles like helping customers, stocking shelves, cooking food and handling baggage. They spend less than 20 per cent of their payrolls on employees in occupations most likely to be affected by generative AI.

The report doesn’t predict potential job losses related to generative AI. That will be up to employers, the report said, and whether they want to bank the savings from AI automation or use that money to invest and grow, adding more workers. Most experts expect that AI will mostly change jobs for the next few years rather than eliminate them – though that could change if the technology improves sharply.

The report highlights the need for increased training to prepare workers to adapt to a fast-arriving technology, SHRM chief executive Johnny C. Taylor Jr. said.

More here:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/bankers-lawyers-and-tech-workers-most-likely-to-be-in-ai-firing-line-20240208-p5f3gp.html

All I can say here is that it looks like the change will be huge over the next decade or two but the professions that have direct physical contact may be spared until the end when they are replace by robotic docs! Oh dear…

David.