It Is Hard Not To Be Amazed At The Way Nvidia Is Taking Over The World!

This appeared last week:

Nvidia forecast shatters estimates as AI boom stays strong

Ian King

May 23, 2024 – 7.19am

San Francisco | Nvidia, the chipmaker at the centre of an artificial intelligence boom, gave another bullish sales forecast, showing that spending on AI computing remains strong.

Second-quarter revenue will be about $US28 billion ($42.3 billion), the company said. Analysts on average had predicted $US26.8 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Results in the fiscal first quarter, which ran through April, also beat projections.

“The next industrial revolution has begun,” chief executive Jensen Huang said in a statement, echoing one of his favourite themes. “AI will bring significant productivity gains to nearly every industry and help companies be more cost- and energy-efficient, while expanding revenue opportunities.”

The upbeat outlook reinforces Nvidia’s status as the biggest beneficiary of AI spending. The company’s so-called AI accelerators – chips that help data centres develop chatbots and other cutting-edge tools – have become a hot commodity in the past two years, sending its sales soaring. Nvidia’s market valuation has skyrocketed as well, topping $US2.3 trillion.

The shares rose about 4 per cent in extended trading on Wednesday (Thursday AEST). They had already gained 92 per cent this year through the close, fuelled by investor hopes that the company would continue to shatter expectations.

The Santa Clara, California-based company also announced a 10-for-1 stock split and boosted its quarterly dividend by 150 per cent to 10 US¢ a share.

“We are poised for our next wave of growth,” Huang said.

Nvidia, co-founded by Huang in 1993, started as a provider of graphics cards for computer gamers. His recognition that the company’s chips were well-suited to developing artificial intelligence software helped open a new market – and gave him a jump on competitors.

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 then sparked a race between major technology companies to build their own AI infrastructure. The scramble made Nvidia’s H100 accelerators a must-have product. They sell for tens of thousands of dollars per chip and are often in scarce supply.

But much of this new revenue has come from a small handful of customers. A group of four companies – Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google – are Nvidia’s largest buyers and account for about 40 per cent of sales.

Huang, 61, is trying to spread his bets by producing complete computers, software and services – aimed at helping more corporations and government agencies deploy their own AI systems.

In the fiscal first quarter, Nvidia’s revenue more than tripled to $US26 billion. Excluding certain items, profit was $US6.12 a share. Analysts had predicted sales of about $US24.7 billion and earnings of $US5.65 a share.

Nvidia’s data-centre division – now by far its largest source of sales – generated $US22.6 billion of revenue. Gaming chips provided $US2.6 billion. Analysts had given targets of $US21 billion for the data-centre unit and $US2.6 billion for gaming.

Nvidia emphasised on Wednesday that it wants to sell its technology to a wider market – moving beyond the giant cloud-computing providers known as hyperscalers. Huang said that AI is moving to consumer internet companies, carmakers and healthcare customers. Countries also are developing their own systems – a trend referred to as sovereign AI.

These opportunities are “creating multiple multibillion-dollar vertical markets” beyond cloud service providers, he said.

Still, the hyperscalers remained a critical growth driver for Nvidia last quarter. They generated about 45 per cent of the company’s data-centre revenue. That suggests Nvidia is in the early stages of diversifying the business.

The company’s new chip platform, called Blackwell, is now in full production, Huang said. And it lays the groundwork for generative AI that can handle trillions of parameters. “We are poised for our next wave of growth,” he said.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/technology/nvidia-forecast-shatters-estimates-as-ai-boom-stays-strong-20240523-p5jfwj

The only question is to ask “how long can it last”?

History is littered with huge successes that somehow always seem to eventually slip down the slippery pole! (Think Ford, Kodak, IBM and so it goes!)

We can be confident history will repeat in time I am certain!

David.

The Pace Of The Progress Of, And Investment In, AI And Chatbots Is Becoming Dizzying!

This appeared a day or so ago:

American chatbots: oversexed, overhyped and over here

In just two weeks, Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have each previewed AI chatbots that critics say are as dangerous as they are impressive.

John Davidson Columnist

May 24, 2024 – 1.16pm

On Monday morning in Seattle, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced the world to a new type of PC that will help Windows computers cash in on the artificial intelligence craze and deal with the threat posed by Apple – both at the same time.

The new laptop computers, known as Copilot+ PCs, feature a complete overhaul of silicon chips typically found in a Windows laptop, replacing Intel-style processors with ones more like those in mobile phones, so the PCs can finally match the battery life of the world’s biggest selling laptop, Apple’s MacBook Air.

And, as part of that silicon upgrade, the Copilot+ PCs will come packed with high-powered AI processors and more than 40 different AI models, Microsoft officials said, to help Windows users with tasks ranging from making swords and escaping zombies in the game Minecraft to changing the settings on the PC.

Showcasing what these new on-device AI models would be capable of, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi revealed a new feature called Recall, that Copilot+ PC owners will be able to use to find anything they have ever seen or done on the computer, “as if you have photographic memory”.

The software frequently takes “snapshot” images of what’s on the user’s screen, saves them on the computer’s storage drive, and allows the AI to sift through them using image and text recognition whenever a user goes looking for something.

In a demo, Microsoft showed Recall calling up a PowerPoint slide with purple handwriting on it, when a Windows user asked the Copilot chatbot to find a chart with purple writing she remembered seeing. The software sifted through Discord chats to find images with purple dresses. It let the user scroll through the history of everything that had been on her computer screen, going back a week, to find something shared in a video call.

Mehdi promised the snapshots would never leave the owner’s Copilot+ PC to be processed in the cloud – the new “neural processing” chips in the computers would do all the image recognition and natural language processing themselves – and that no AI model would ever be trained on what it saw on users’ screens. All the same, by week’s end, Recall was getting heavily criticised for its potential privacy and security risks.

Privacy advocates worried that abusive partners who know their partner’s password could log on and scroll through snapshots of every web page viewed on the PC.

Workplace security experts said they were concerned the snapshots could reveal passwords if they happened to be taken at the same time a user was typing them in and the password entry software didn’t follow standard on-screen cloaking measures (which show passwords as a series of asterisks).

Likewise, confidential documents could get hoovered up into Recall’s database, just by calling them up onto Copilot+ PC screen, security experts said. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has asked Microsoft to explain itself.

But Microsoft isn’t the only major technology company that’s just shown off new AI capabilities that critics warn come with inherent risks.

A week before the Copilot+ PC launch, Microsoft’s AI partner OpenAI revealed a new “multi-modal” ChatGPT chatbot, based on a new AI model known as GPT-4o that’s capable of using not just text for its inputs and outputs, but also audio and video.

“The new voice [and video] mode is the best computer interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies, and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real,” said OpenAI cofounder and CEO, Sam Altman, at the time.

The new chatbot also surprised critics, who complained it was overly flirtatious in the OpenAI demo. And it surprised the actor Scarlett Johansson, who said she had been in talks to allow OpenAI to use her voice for the chatbot, but had never agreed to it, and was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the chatbot had “a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine”.

(The new chatbot model, minus Johansson’s voice, will be one of the 40-plus new AI models appearing in Copilot+ PCs, and it’s the one Windows users can share their screen with to help escape the zombies, Microsoft said.)

A day after GPT-4o was launched, Google showed off a new multi-modal chatbot of its own, for now named Project Astra, which can take in vastly more information than OpenAI’s chatbot can, and reason over it to answer questions with up-to-the-minute information.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s goal was to allow its chatbots to absorb “infinite context” whenever they’re answering a question, overcoming a limitation in current chatbots that means they often reply with months-old information that was gathered when the AI model was trained, rather than when the question was asked.

The new stuff is “impressive”, says Professor Anton Van Den Hengel, a former director of applied science at Amazon and the director of The University of Adelaide’s Centre for Augmented Reasoning.

A chatbot with infinite context could, for instance, help a cardiologist diagnose heart disease using “the absolute latest cardiology research”, he says.

Meanwhile, the move to multi-modal chatbots will help popularise AI in ways that were not possible with the text-only chatbots. Enabling voice and video chats is going to lead to an explosion of new user-generated AI applications that will match the explosion of user-generated video that occurred when YouTube appeared, he predicts.

But there’s a problem.

Chatbots from American companies such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta are typically trained on 100 times more American data than they are on Australian data, he says, and using them will tend to homogenise Australian culture around American values.

The Australian public service is now looking into using Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot as part of its workflow, and emails, documents and even government policies written with Copilot “will embody the American training data (Copilot) has been built from” more than it embodies Australian data, Professor Van Den Hengel warns.

“We have to decide collectively whether we’re going to have our own cultural and digital identity, or whether we’re just going to be homogenised. At the moment, it’s pretty clear which way we’re headed,” he says.

Dr Dana McKay, acting dean of Interaction Technology and Information at RMIT, has similar mixed feelings about the new generation of chatbots.

Adding voice and video prompts and replies to the chatbots will make them “incredibly inclusive”, she says, and will open up not just AI but computing as a whole to a range of people who now find computers inaccessible.

Multi-modality is great news for people with low literacy or visual impairment or even dyslexia, she says, and could even lead to new forms of creativity as people figure out how to combine text prompts with visual ones.

But the extremely high cost of training such chatbots is a problem, she says. Not only will it tend to force American values on the world because it’s generally only US-based big tech that can afford to train them, it also risks replacing the old digital divide, accessibility, with a new one: affordability.

There’s a real possibility that people who can afford to access the best chatbots will get to pay with money, while people who can’t afford it will have to pay for it by sacrificing their privacy and turning their personal information into training data.

“This could actually increase the divide between the haves and the have-nots,” Dr McKay says.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/technology/american-chatbots-oversexed-overhyped-and-over-here-20240524-p5jg9t

Sounds to me like we are seeing a new version of American Cultural Imperialism and that we are going to have to work a whole lot harder to preserve of Australian distinctiveness and cultural identity against this US onslaught It was forever thus but seems to be accelerating.

To date I am not aware of having been faced with a chatbot as an interlocutor but I am sure the time is coming and fast.

What experiences – good and bad – have you had, so far, with the technology?

David.

This Attack Just Seems To Get More And More Ugly The More We Learn!

This appeared late last week.

MediSecure patient data up for sale on Russian hacking forum

May 24, 2024 — 5.38pm

A hacker claiming to have Australian patient data from the MediSecure data breach has put the information up for sale on a Russian hacking forum for $US50,000 ($75,735)

MediSecure, which provides electronic prescription services to healthcare professionals, last week announced it had been the victim of a large-scale ransomware attack which the Australian Federal Police are now investigating.

A week later, a member of a Russian hacking forum has claimed to be in possession of 6.5 terabytes of data, with personal information, including insurance numbers, names and addresses of thousands of Australians, up for grabs.

“For sale: Database of an Australian medical prescriptions company MedSecure [sic],” the post reads.

“Includes information on citizens, insurance numbers, phone numbers, addresses, full names, supplier information, contractor information, emails, user+passwords for MedSecure website, prescription information (who was prescribed what), IP addresses of visitors to the site and etc.”

The forum member said they would only sell the information to one buyer.

Australia’s national cybersecurity coordinator, Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, is working with federal government agencies and states and territories to respond to the incident. The Australian information commissioner is also investigating whether MediSecure complied with federal laws requiring companies to notify authorities when they become aware of a data breach.

Cybersecurity analyst group CyberKnow said their research indicated the forum post was likely legitimate.

“The threat actor created their account on May 15, 2024, and may well have created it for the sole purpose of attempting to sell the stolen MediSecure data. They have not posted anything else to the forum,” CyberKnow said in a statement.

“A good takeaway for Australians from this incident is to appreciate that the cyberthreat landscape is diverse, and groups and actors can impact businesses regardless of their capability, organisation or structure.”

MediSecure was contacted for comment, as was the office of federal Cybersecurity Minister Clare O’Neil.

“The cybersecurity incident relates to data held by MediSecure’s systems up until November 2023,” the company said last Saturday.
‘Continual challenges’

Earlier this week, Australian Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind said the MediSecure hack had again highlighted deficiencies in how organisations collect and protect customer data.

“While this situation is ongoing, any major data breach reinforces the reality of today’s world: there are increasing cyberthreats and continual challenges to digital defences,” she said on Tuesday.

“Protecting individuals’ personal information should be a top priority for all organisations, which should continually review and improve their practices and take control where they can. Only collect information that is necessary for you to carry out your business. Know what information you hold. And if that information is not necessary to your business, delete it.

“The coverage of Australia’s privacy legislation lags behind the advancing skills of malicious cyberactors. Reform of the Privacy Act is urgent to ensure all Australian organisations build the highest levels of security into their operations”, Kind said.

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/medisecure-patient-data-up-for-sale-on-russian-hacking-forum-20240524-p5jggb.html

This hack / attack really seems to have gone to the next level. I really wonder what the Government / Authorities can actually do to contain the damage – especially when the data is held in a foreign and hardly friendly jurisdiction, by an actor seeking profit.

It will be interesting to see what is done, if anything, and how effective the powers that be can be!

We wait and watch…

David.

Is This All Just AI Hype Or Should We Really Be Worried?

This appeared a few days ago.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Big tech has distracted world from existential risk of AI, says top scientist

Alex Hern UK technology editor

Sat 25 May 2024 15.00 AEST

Big tech has succeeded in distracting the world from the existential risk to humanity that artificial intelligence still poses, a leading scientist and AI campaigner has warned.

Speaking with the Guardian at the AI Summit in Seoul, South Korea, Max Tegmark said the shift in focus from the extinction of life to a broader conception of safety of artificial intelligence risked an unacceptable delay in imposing strict regulation on the creators of the most powerful programs.

“In 1942, Enrico Fermi built the first ever reactor with a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under a Chicago football field,” Tegmark, who trained as a physicist, said. “When the top physicists at the time found out about that, they really freaked out, because they realised that the single biggest hurdle remaining to building a nuclear bomb had just been overcome. They realised that it was just a few years away – and in fact, it was three years, with the Trinity test in 1945.

“AI models that can pass the Turing test [where someone cannot tell in conversation that they are not speaking to another human] are the same warning for the kind of AI that you can lose control over. That’s why you get people like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio – and even a lot of tech CEOs, at least in private – freaking out now.”

Tegmark’s non-profit Future of Life Institute led the call last year for a six-month “pause” in advanced AI research on the back of those fears. The launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model in March that year was the canary in the coalmine, he said, and proved that the risk was unacceptably close.

Despite thousands of signatures, from experts including Hinton and Bengio, two of the three “godfathers” of AI who pioneered the approach to machine learning that underpins the field today, no pause was agreed.

Instead, the AI summits, of which Seoul is the second following Bletchley Park in the UK last November, have led the fledgling field of AI regulation. “We wanted that letter to legitimise the conversation, and are quite delighted with how that worked out. Once people saw that people like Bengio are worried, they thought, ‘It’s OK for me to worry about it.’ Even the guy in my gas station said to me, after that, that he’s worried about AI replacing us.

“But now, we need to move from just talking the talk to walking the walk.”

Since the initial announcement of what became the Bletchley Park summit, however, the focus of international AI regulation has shifted away from existential risk.

In Seoul, only one of the three “high-level” groups addressed safety directly, and it looked at the “full spectrum” of risks, “from privacy breaches to job market disruptions and potential catastrophic outcomes”. Tegmark argues that the playing-down of the most severe risks is not healthy – and is not accidental.

“That’s exactly what I predicted would happen from industry lobbying,” he said. “In 1955, the first journal articles came out saying smoking causes lung cancer, and you’d think that pretty quickly there would be some regulation. But no, it took until 1980, because there was this huge push to by industry to distract. I feel that’s what’s happening now.

“Of course AI causes current harms as well: there’s bias, it harms marginalised groups … But like [the UK science and technology secretary] Michelle Donelan herself said, it’s not like we can’t deal with both. It’s a bit like saying, ‘Let’s not pay any attention to climate change because there’s going to be a hurricane this year, so we should just focus on the hurricane.’”

Tegmark’s critics have made the same argument of his own claims: that the industry wants everyone to speak about hypothetical risks in the future to distract from concrete harms in the present, an accusation that he dismisses. “Even if you think about it on its own merits, it’s pretty galaxy-brained: it would be quite 4D chess for someone like [OpenAI boss] Sam Altman, in order to avoid regulation, to tell everybody that it could be lights out for everyone and then try to persuade people like us to sound the alarm.”

Instead, he argues, the muted support from some tech leaders is because “I think they all feel that they’re stuck in an impossible situation where, even if they want to stop, they can’t. If a CEO of a tobacco company wakes up one morning and feels what they’re doing is not right, what’s going to happen? They’re going to replace the CEO. So the only way you can get safety first is if the government puts in place safety standards for everybody.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/25/big-tech-existential-risk-ai-scientist-max-tegmark-regulations?utm_term=66518da53f09b710595e9f334fb93a19

I have to say I am not sure that we need to be as worried as the author about our collective future(s), bur, on the other hand, there are surely some real risks out there! What is hard for me is to work out is, being aware of the oncoming locomotive, knowing exactly what to do to mitigate the outcome(s)

The future is uncertain, as it is always, but we really just need to push forward and hope for the best, despite the current complexities that beset us….

That said I am hopeful we will ‘muddle through’!

There is a very long history of dire threats resolving themselves over time. I suspect this will just be another…. I hope so!

What do you think?

David.

It Would Be Interesting To Know Just How Dependent Australia Is On Overseas Supply For Critical Medicines.

This appeared today:

‘Havoc’ for patients as hundreds of medicines in short supply

By Mary Ward and Amber Schultz

May 26, 2024 — 5.01am

Hundreds of key medicines are in short supply in Australia as experts warn the problem is putting lives and livelihoods at risk.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) lists more than 420 medicines as being in shortage, 20 of which are at critical levels, including blood thinners, antibiotics and hormone replacement therapy medication.

Royal College of Australian General Practitioners president Dr Nicole Higgins said Australia had faced an ongoing medicine shortage since COVID-19 but the problem was getting worse.

“Some critical medication shortages impact people’s immediate health, and others impact their ability to function,” she said.

As an example, Higgins said the shortage of five-milligram doses of blood thinners meant people had to use smaller tablets to get the same dose, and this could increase bleeding, side effects and complications.

“What shortages mean for patients is that at best, it’s inconvenient, at worst, it can be very dangerous,” she said.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler referred questions to the TGA, which said managing medicine supply was a priority for the Australian government.

“The number of shortages appearing on the TGA’s Medicine Shortage Reports Database has been relatively consistent since the introduction of mandatory reporting in January 2019. The TGA receives an average of 120 notifications of new medicine shortages every month, with 12 of these having a critical impact rating,” a spokesperson said.

“Medicine shortages can arise for many reasons, ranging from shortages of raw materials, natural disasters, logistical difficulties, batches of the medicine not meeting applicable specifications, or increased demand.”

Pharmaceutical Society of Australia spokesperson and Melbourne pharmacist Peter Guthrey said the shortages were challenging for pharmacists, who must send women back to their GP for scripts for alternative hormone treatments in stock at their pharmacy, resulting in additional gap fees and time.

“A number of women have expressed frustration that there hasn’t been a resolution to this issue by now, and that they believe a similar issue affected medicines predominantly for men wouldn’t be allowed to go on unresolved for so long,” he said.

David Heffernan, president of the NSW branch of the Pharmacy Guild, said shortages resulted from supply chain issues that had been evident even before the pandemic.

“When one brand of drug goes out, that means there’s double the use of the other,” he said.

Australian Medical Association vice president Dr Danielle McMullen said the shortages had been “frustrating”, obliging doctors and patients to devise workarounds. Altered management strategies then had an impact on the time and energy that patients spend running around different pharmacies.

From July 2023, the Medicines Supply Security Guarantee was introduced, requiring manufacturers to hold a minimum of four or six months’ stock in Australia for key medicines. McMullen said there needed to be greater enforcement of these stockpiling requirements.

Among the 423 medicines currently in shortage in Australia are several treatments used by menopausal women to manage symptoms such as hot flushes and night sweats.

Menopause hormonal therapy (MHT) – also known as hormone replacement therapy (HRT) – refers to a range of patches, creams, tablets and devices to replace oestrogen, which declines with age.

The treatments, particularly in patch form, have soared in popularity in the past five years after a 2019 Lancet paper largely dispelled previous concerns about breast cancer risk.

Of the nine brands of HRT patches available in Australia, eight are in short supply and the other is not available on the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS).

Over several years, there have been occasional shortages of the patches. However, Vicki Doherty, executive director of the Australian Menopause Society, said the current shortage was the longest run to date in Australia.

She said it was particularly frustrating that the predicted dates for a return to normal supply – provided by the medicines’ sponsors to the TGA – had been repeatedly pushed back. For most MHT brands, return to normal supply is estimated between mid-June and the start of August.

“I have heard stories of women going to multiple pharmacies, getting very frustrated and upset,” Doherty said. “Our member doctors are telling us they’re spending their whole lunchbreak trying to find suppliers for their patients.”

Doherty believes the MHT shortages are the result of a “perfect storm”, the combination of increased demand thanks to studies showing the efficacy of MHT, the discontinuation of popular brands including Climara and the supply chain and market issues.

“It can create havoc for women, this really does impact their quality of life,” she said.

The TGA was unable to provide data on MHT prescriptions made in Australia.

Submissions to a coming federal senate inquiry on menopause from several healthcare organisations, published last month, raised concerns about the availability and cost of MHT.

The submissions supported MHT as an effective treatment for menopause symptoms. Most menopause treatments developed in the past 15 years are not subsidised in Australia and cost women $50 a month, while treatments listed on the PBS cost about $25 a month.

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/havoc-for-patients-as-hundreds-of-medicines-in-short-supply-20240523-p5jfzt.html

I know I will be seen as a ‘old male white dude’ for wondering but I found it rather odd that with lots of different categories of seriously life-saving drugs apparently in short supply the second half of the article was devoted to hormonal medications which are some-what more optional – and certainly not life-saving in the short term!

Be that as it may be – we, as a nation, need to work to break our dependence on importation of major critical medicines – by fostering a more robust local pharmaceutical manufacturing industry – and making sure we can manufacture the basic WHO list of essential medications on shore – for national security reasons at least.

The WHO list is found here:

https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-MHP-HPS-EML-2023.02

WHO Model List of Essential Medicines - 23rd list, 2023

26 July 2023 – 67 Pages

Download (904.9 kB)

Overview

Essential medicines are those that satisfy the priority health care needs of a population. They are selected with due regard to disease prevalence and public health relevance, evidence of efficacy and safety and comparative cost-effectiveness. They are intended to be available in functioning health systems at all times, in appropriate dosage forms, of assured quality and at prices individuals and health systems can afford.

The WHO Model List of Essential Medicines and Model List of Essential Medicines for Children are updated and published every two years, intended as a guide for countries or regional authorities to adopt or adapt in accordance with local priorities and treatment guidelines for the development and updating of national essential medicines lists. Selection of a limited number of essential medicines as essential, taking into consideration national disease burden and clinical need can lead to improved access through streamlined procurement and distribution of quality-assured medicines, support more rational or appropriate prescribing and use and lower costs for both health care systems and for patients.

---- End Quote

It would be fascinating to know how much of this list can presently be make locally – does anyone know? I reckon we should nationally aim for self-sufficiency in the 'essentials list;!

Any input welcome!

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 748 – Results – 26 May, 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

Given That MediSecure Seems To Have Largely Ceased e-Prescription Services Provision Does The Reported Data Breach Matter All That Much?

Yes, It Still Matters                                                      32 (97%)

No                                                                                  1 (3%)

I Have No Idea                                                              0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 33

A very clear cut vote suggesting all data breaches are a serious worry!

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

A very good voting turnout. 

0 of 33 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.

This Sure Has To Be Some Good News From The UK!

This appeared last week!

Blood protein test could spot cancer seven years earlier

By Poppy Koronka

The Times

Updated 1:20PM May 16, 2024, First published at 7:30AM May 16, 2024

Scientists have discovered proteins in the blood that could indicate that cancer is developing up to seven years before diagnosis.

Researchers in two studies funded by Cancer Research UK identified 618 proteins linked to 19 types of cancer - including 107 proteins in blood collected seven years before the disease was found.

The scientists, from Oxford Population Health, suggest that these proteins may be involved in the earlier stages of cancer and could be used to detect it much earlier.

Dr Keren Papier, senior nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health and joint first author of the first study, said: “To save more lives from cancer, we need to better understand what happens at the earliest stages of the disease.

“Data from thousands of people with cancer has revealed really exciting insights into how the proteins in our blood can affect our risk of cancer. Now we need to study these proteins in depth to see which ones could be reliably used for prevention.”

The first paper, published on Wednesday in Nature Communications, used blood samples from the UK Biobank from more than 44,000 people - including 4,900 who later had a cancer diagnosis.

Using a technique called proteomics, the team studied nearly 1,500 proteins in each blood sample and analysed which were present in those who went on to get cancer.

They found 107 proteins that were present seven years before an official diagnosis and 182 proteins present three years before diagnosis. In the second study, published at the end of April in the same journal, scientists analysed genetic data from more than 300,000 cancer cases to understand which proteins could be linked to cancer development.

They found 40 blood proteins that were thought to influence someone’s risk of getting nine different types of cancer.

While these findings may eventually be used to help identify and treat cancers early, the team stressed that further research was needed to understand the exact roles these proteins play in cancer development, and which proteins may be the most reliable indicators to test for.

Joshua Atkins, senior genomic epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health and joint first author of the first study, said: “The genes we are born with, and the proteins made from them, are hugely influential in how cancer starts and grows.

“Thanks to the thousands of people who gave blood samples to UK BioBank, we are building a much more comprehensive picture of how genes influence cancer development over many years.”

Dr Iain Foulkes, the executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK, said: “Preventing cancer means looking out for the earliest warning signs of the disease. That means intensive, painstaking research to find the molecular signals we should pay closest attention to.

“Discoveries from this research are the crucial first step towards offering preventative therapies which is the ultimate route for giving people longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/blood-protein-test-could-spot-cancer-seven-years-earlier/news-story/2fc4daa9a9a3f3fe093ba9667cea382b

That tech, if it works as promised, would be a great screening test!

Lets hope it happens soon.

David.

The Productivity Commission Administers A Swift Kick Up The Backside Of The ADHA For Financial Waste!

This appeared last week.

Report finds My Health Record ‘plagued’ with poor usability

Chelsea Heaney

---

16 May 2024

It also found automation of simple tasks could free up to 30% of clinicians’ time, and data sharing could save $5.4 billion.

A new Productivity Commission report has revealed that investment into digital technology in healthcare and improving the management of My Health Record (MHR) could save more than $5 billion a year.  
 
Increased data sharing in healthcare could save $355 million from fewer duplicated tests alone, it found.
 
The report states that while nine out of 10 GPs now practice digitally, with no paper records, progress is ‘more mixed when it comes to realising the gains of digital information sharing’. 
 
With around 7000 accredited GP clinics and 700 public hospitals in Australia, the report said there is a lag in information access between acute and community care. 
 
‘These providers have invested in different digital systems, each with their own data structures, clinical terminology and standards,’ it states. 
 
‘MHR was intended to be a solution to this siloed data structure, providing a central access point for a patient’s most important health data.  
 
‘But despite an investment of more than $2 billion, it continues to be plagued by incomplete records and poor usability.’ 
 
Repairing this ‘disconnected information management and sharing landscape’ will be challenging, the report highlights, but overall would result in ‘significant payoffs’. 
 
‘In addition to the substantial cost savings it could provide, better data also lays the foundation for other digital health applications, such as remote care and AI,’ it reads. 
 
RACGP Expert Committee – Practice Technology and Management Chair Dr Rob Hosking said GPs often get frustrated when they find key information missing from MHR. 
 
‘It’s a bit of a vicious cycle because once you look a few times and there’s nothing there, you stop looking,’ he told newsGP.  
 
‘But every now and again, there’ll be more information. 
 
‘What will probably eventually drive more uploads is more utilisation by the patients, when they are reviewing their own records and realise that the records are incomplete.’ 
 
The Productivity Commission found data sharing across healthcare providers can also reduce the incidence of adverse events.  
 
‘When GPs do not receive hospital discharge summaries, the risk of an individual being readmitted to hospital within seven days increases by 79%,’ the report reads. 
 
It also says there are major issues in MHR that have created gaps in the system. 
 
‘Consumers need to link their MHR through MyGov to access their records,’ it states.  
 
But as of March 2024, less than one-third, or 6.7 million had done so. 
 
The report also highlights that despite almost all GPs being registered on the system, they can also choose not to enter patient data into MHR, even for individuals that have opted in, meaning ‘the amount of detail contained within an individual’s record varies’. 
 
The report has put forward making MHR uploading mandatory for GPs, but states that ‘getting the information onto the system is only half the challenge – clinicians also need to draw on this valuable information’. 
 
If this is to occur, the Productivity Commission says mandatory uploading will need to be accompanied by ‘changes that allow practitioners to efficiently search large volumes of data and display reports in a way that is easy to read and accessible’. 
 
Commission estimates suggest that around 2% of documents uploaded by healthcare providers are viewed by other healthcare providers. 
 
But Dr Hosking says it is too early to mandate GPs to upload to MHR and adding extra upload times to GPs’ hours would be ‘unacceptable’. 
 
‘At the moment, we are rewarded [through the Practice Incentives Program eHealth Incentive] for uploading a small percentage of our patients’ summaries to MHR, so it’s a carrot rather than a stick,’ he said. 
 
‘If it’s an upload, it’s going to add extra time, if it’s automated, that’s a different story.’ 
 
Dr Hosking said it will become mandatory for pathology and diagnostic imaging to be uploaded onto MHR if legislation passes by the end of the year. 
 
‘That’s going to make a huge difference,’ he said. 
 
Additionally, the Commission says surveys show that administrative tasks are consuming too much of healthcare workers time and should be taken over by AI. 
 
‘AI technology based on large language models has been developed that can transcribe notes during a consultation, draft referral letters and care plans and complete other forms of documentation,’ the report said. 
 
‘AI can also automate labour-intensive tasks such as clinical coding of data, with a recent pilot finding that processing time for a full-time equivalent worker improved by 30% using AI.’ 
 
Dr Hosking agrees that AI can be used efficiently to transcribe consults but is not ready to be used in clinical decision making. 
 
‘Transcription of notes is time consuming for clinicians and GPs, so that’s one area that it can work really well,’ he said. 
 
‘If software is functioning as a medical device it needs to be registered with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and it has to undergo specific testing and safety clearance.  
 
‘At the moment that’s what the TGA is currently grappling – how to regulate it and make sure that those tools are safe.’ 
 
AI and digital technology for general practice is set to be a talking point at the RACGP 2024 Practice Owners Conference next week. 
 
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Here is the link:

https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/professional/report-finds-my-health-record-plagued-with-poor-us

I wonder when the PC is just going to admit the myHR is just a silly, obsolete idea and close the whole thing down, spending the money saved on something more useful?

We can dream I guess….

David.