Here are a few I have come across the last week or so. Note: Each link is followed by a title and a few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
General Comment
An interesting week with personal privacy and data privacy being on top of the agenda with the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica saga grabbing world headlines and Telstra Health having a rather problematic data breach with Argus Secure Messaging Software.
Enjoy the browse.
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Medical records exposed by flaw in Telstra Health's Argus software
By Ben Grubb
Updated22 March 2018 — 8:19amfirst published at 8:09am
A flaw in medical software used by more than 40,000 Australian health specialists and distributed by Telstra has potentially exposed Australians' medical information to hackers, who have been logging into practitioners' computers and servers to carry out illegal activities.
Called Argus, the software is used by hospitals, GPs, specialists, primary health networks and allied health providers. According to Telstra Health, which acquired the software in 2013, these customers "trust Argus to securely communicate confidential patient information quickly and reliably, in-line with privacy standards".
The flaw in the "secure" messaging software is specifically leaving computers with remote desktop software installed wide open, because, a medical industry source told Fairfax Media, it creates a separate username with a static default password that allowed for an easy intrusion.
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Flaw in Telstra Health's Argus software exposed medical records to hackers
Lynne Minion | 22 Mar 2018
Telstra Health has taken steps to close cybergaps and help out its healthcare customers after the company became aware that medical records were being left exposed by a flaw in its Argus software.
Used by more than 40,000 providers, including hospitals, GPs, specialists, primary health networks and allied health providers, a flaw in the electronic messaging service’s software could have left Australians' health information vulnerable to cyberattack, according to a Fairfax Media report.
Argus created a separate username and a static default password for computers installed with remote desktop access software, which could allow hackers to penetrate the system.
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ANZ's Maile Carnegie says Medicare data could build new e-health industry
Medicare provides one of the best-organised and comprehensive sets of healthcare data in the world, providing Australia with a strategic advantage to create a new niche for the local technology industry while improving health outcomes for millions of people, said Maile Carnegie, the head of digital banking at ANZ.
In a session at the ASIC Annual Forum on how data can improve company decisions and grow the economy, Ms Carnegie, the former boss of Google in Australia, said if the government were to open up healthcare data to outside developers, advancements in artificial intelligence and genomics technology could "drive dramatically better health outcomes for the population and wonderful industries for the country and companies who can get onto it early".
"Australia has a completely 'home run' data set that if any other government in the world looked at, they would be salivating over – and that is our health care records," she said.
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Moving to a digital future
E-health has long been hampered by political and bureaucratic buck-passing, and has been a source of frustration for all practitioners, and no doubt to most patients as well
The AJP recently spoke to two of the key leaders from the Australian Digital Health Agency to find out the latest about the My Health Record program.
Dr Monica Trujillo (MT) is chief clinical information officer and executive general manager, Clinical and Consumer Engagement and Clinical Governance at the Australian Digital Health Agency. Prior to this role, Dr Trujillo was Australia’s first chief medical information officer at UnitingCare Health.
Vicki Ibrahim (VI) is a Brisbane-based pharmacist and Medicines Safety Program director at the Australian Digital Health Agency.
AJP: Has there been a lot of growth in pharmacies signing up since more software providers rolled out My Health Record (MHR)?
VI: The growth in pharmacy registration remains organic at the moment, as the registration process is multi-layered and requires input from several organisations. We signed six contracts in May 2017 to very important vendors. Three of them have completed technical development and are now connected to My Health Record.
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First My Health Record connected town
By Jonathan Nally
Monday, 19 March, 2018
The community of Berrigan in NSW is the first town in Australia where all key healthcare providers are connected and using My Health Record.
The local general practice, pharmacy, aged-care centres and the local hospital are all connected to the system.
In addition, more than 50% of the town’s population of around 950 people and every resident in the aged-care facility has an active My Health Record.
“In my experience, small rural communities have an inspiring sense of community spirit and connectedness,” said Murrumbidgee Primary Health Network (MPHN) acting CEO Melissa Neal.
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Regional Towns Moving To My Health Record System
The rollout of digital health records for Eyre Peninsula patients is moving a step closer.
It comes as the first town in Regional Australia (Berrigan, NSW) connects all of its key healthcare providers to the My Health Record system.
More than 5.5 million Australians already have a My Health Record with the remainder set to have one by the end of the year, unless they choose to opt out.
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Feedback invited on implementation plan for Australia’s National Digital Health Strategy
By: Priyankar Bhunia
Published: 19 Mar 2018
The draft framework includes plans for several nationwide initiatives such as a provider addressing service, an integrated digital identity framework, aligned to Digital Transformation Agency identity and authentication frameworks; an Interoperability Strategy; a digital medicines management blueprint; and a new Health Innovation Exchange.
The Strategy seeks to put the consumer at the centre of their healthcare, providing choice, control and transparency. The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), in consultation with the states and territories, has drafted a Framework for Action to support the strategy’s implementation. ADHA is running a consultation to gain wider feedback on the draft framework.
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National Clinical Terminology Service Connectathon - 17 April 2018
The Australian Digital Health Agency in collaboration with the CSIRO, is hosting its fifth technical Connectathon on the National Clinical Terminology Service (NCTS) including its use of HL7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®). The Connectathon will be held 17 April 2018 in Brisbane - register online by COB 3 April.
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Australia's eHealth NSW leads upgrade for better imaging to enhance patient care
By: Nicky Lung
Published: 22 Mar 2018
The ability for clinicians across the state to access diagnostic-quality medical images real time will enhance decision-making process and patient care.
As announced last week, eHealth NSW led a major state-wide upgrade of the Enterprise Imaging Repository (EIR) viewer software which allows NSW Health clinicians to access diagnostic-quality medical images from across the state.
The EIR is the centralised imaging store for NSW Health, and its viewer enables centralised images and reports to be assessed from any modern PC within NSW public hospitals, NSW Ambulance and Justice Health. Since 2012, the EIR has provided clinical staff with immediate access to a patient’s previous and current images, scans and reports, irrespective of which public hospital the patient has visited.
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eHealth Queensland’s head on stunning ieMR stats and a future of interstate digital health collaboration
Lynne Minion | 20 Mar 2018
An interconnected Australian healthcare sector with collaboration transcending state borders, stunning ieMR stats at Princess Alexandra Hospital, and patient records on mobile phones are all on the mind of the man driving the digital health reformation in Queensland, as the state readies to flick on yet another implementation.
With Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital primed to go live with its ieMR in early April, eHealth Queensland’s CEO Dr Richard Ashby is clearly a man with momentum.
“By this time next year approximately half of the state's population will be draining to digital hospitals,” he said.
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Home and hospital integrated care as Oneview Connect is deployed in the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network
Laura Lovett | 19 Mar 2018
Healthcare management and communication platform Oneview has announced it will be deploying its new app, Oneview Connect, at Sydney Children’s Hospital Network, the largest network of hospitals and services for children in Australia.
The app is designed to help patients and their caregivers not just while the patient is in the hospital but also when the patient is at home.
“At the heart of what we do is trying to provide patients with contextual, real-time information regardless of where they are in their journey,” James Fritter, CEO of Oneview, told MobiHealthNews.
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Healthcare industry faces increased email threats: Mimecast
Global email and data security company Mimecast has drawn attention, through a survey, to the extent to which the health and human services industry is being attacked through email threats.
The company's ANZ country manager Nick Lennon and ANZ technical director Alison O'Hare both underlined to iTWire this week that be it a small or big outfit, the email security issues faced were roughly similar.
The survey drew on Mimecast's worldwide data, from its 29,200 clients. Asked what percentage were in Australia, Lennon said about 4% of revenue came from this country, indicating that the user percentage could be as much.
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19 March 2018
Is blockchain a good fit for health?
Just a few short years ago, the technology known as blockchain was really only being talked about in niche technical journals.
These days, it is being promoted as the most disruptive technology since the internet, with the potential to transform many industries, including healthcare.
But few people, when pressed, can really say what the technology is, or explain how it will affect their lives.
Some may recognise blockchain as the technology that underpins the cryptocurrency called bitcoin, but beyond that, it all gets a bit fuzzy.
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Health Minister sees digitisation as improving the quality of healthcare
eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth
The Government is developing a Digital Health Strategy to support new and improved models of care and is considering the viability of a national Electronic Health Record.
Digitisation will improve care and quality in New Zealand’s public health service, says New Zealand’s Minister of Health, Dr David Clark.
The Minister says that a strong digital health system can help people to access healthcare when, how and where they need it.
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More setbacks for Qld's $100m payroll overhaul
Deadline extended until end of 2019.
Queensland’s long-running emergency services payroll overhaul is now unlikely to be finished before the end of next year, after the state’s ambulance service asked for more time to transition to the new system.
The program has been slowly replacing the Lattice payroll system – the same solution at the centre of the infamous Queensland Health payroll failure – at the state’s public safety agencies since 2014.
It will see Queensland Fire and Emergency Services, Queensland Corrective Services, Inspector-General Emergency Management, and the Queensland Ambulance Service move to using Queensland Shared Service’s Aurion HR system and a new HCM solution.
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DTA to bring liveness detection to Govpass
Asks industry to help prevent fraud.
The Digital Transformation Agency will include a liveness detection mechanism in its Govpass identity platform to prevent the creation of fraudulent digital identities.
The agency today asked the market for liveness image capture software that can integrate within the federal government identity provider (IdP) component of Govpass.
A series of IdPs will make up the DTA's national federated identity ecosystem, likely including banks and state or territory governments, but there will be only one IdP for the Commonwealth.
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Inside DHS' new private cloud
Infrastructure overhaul takes shape.
The Department of Human Services is planning to house a data lake, analytics, and machine learning capabilities inside an “elastic” private cloud currently under construction.
Head of enterprise architecture Garrett McDonald told iTnews on the sidelines of IBM’s Think 2018 conference that the private cloud would initially sit across x86 and IBM Power Systems hardware.
“We’re looking to create a private cloud across x86 and Power in the first instance, but we would love to stretch that onto Z Linux [IBM mainframe servers],” McDonald said.
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Government ‘considering’ next stage of Medicare program
- The Australian
- 10:43AM March 22, 2018
Sean Parnell
The Turnbull government is actively considering the next stage of its program to replace deteriorating Medicare and aged care payment systems, the issue that fuelled Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign at the last election.
The long-running program was prompted by warnings from bureaucrats that the existing systems were “old, overly complicated, expensive to operate and change and ... in need of redevelopment”.
However, the secrecy that surrounded the work last term, combined with a freeze on Medicare rebates and the dumped GP co-payment, prompted Labor’s claim that the Coalition wanted to privatise Medicare.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced to promise the new payments system would be owned, operated and controlled by the government. Since the election, the government has contracted about $40 million in work to consultants — the program has a budget of $67.3 million this financial year — to find private sector expertise for new systems.
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The Australian government and the loose definition of IT projects 'working well'
Straight-faced, a Department of Human Services representative told a Senate committee its data-matching 'robodebt' project went well, because it produced savings.
The Department of Human Services (DHS) found itself in the spotlight last year after kicking off a data-matching program of work that saw it automatically issue debt notices to those in receipt of welfare payments through the country's Centrelink scheme.
The Online Compliance Intervention (OCI) program had automatically compared the income people declared to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) against income declared to Centrelink, and the debt notice -- along with a 10 percent recovery fee -- was subsequently issued when a disparity in government data was detected.
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GPs want clinical handovers, not discharge summaries
Katrina McLean
Michael Rice
Nick Tellis
This is the third article in a monthly series from members of the GPs Down Under (GPDU) Facebook group, a not-for-profit GP community-led group that is based on GP-led learning, peer support and GP advocacy.
“PASSING the baton” describes what health care professionals try to achieve as care of patients is transferred between providers in our complex health care systems. The topic of safe and effective clinical handover comes up repeatedly in discussions on GPDU.
It is apparent that the impacts from delayed or poor clinical handover on patient care across the country are significant, under-reported, and have a profoundly negative effect on the care patients receive.
Dropping the baton
First-hand accounts of treatment delays, duplication of testing, medication errors, and unplanned readmissions are frequently discussed by GPs. Recent clinical case discussions have included a patient in palliative care being transferred to a hospice on a Friday afternoon with no clinical handover, and a 3-month delay in the completion of a discharge summary for a truck driver who was admitted with a myocardial function.
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DHS wants analytics to stop 'inadvertent' overpayment of benefits
Aims to predict problems, not recover debts.
The Department of Human Services is looking at whether predictive analytics can help prevent “inadvertent overpayment” of benefits to welfare recipients.
The initiative is one of several involving artificial intelligence or advanced analytics that was revealed by the department’s head of enterprise architecture Garrett McDonald at IBM’s Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas.
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Detecting breast cancer with artificial intelligence
Hungarian research, published in Scientific Reports, has shown that “deep learning” artificial intelligence that is widely used to detect objects in images could improve early breast cancer detection. Computer assisted detection (CAD) systems have been used over the past two decades to help radiologists detect breast cancer by analysing mammograms and marking suspicious regions, which are then reviewed by a radiologist. However, use of these technologies is expensive ($400 million a year in the US) and their benefits remain controversial. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning. Its networks are inspired by knowledge of how biological brains, such as those of humans or animals, work. Deep learning networks “learn” from datasets annotated by humans to reach image recognition capabilities similar to those of humans’. The researchers proposed an improved CAD system based on state-of-the-art deep learning that can be trained to detect and localise breast lesions. When tested on a dataset of 115 mammography cases (two of four images per case) with proven cancers, the authors’ improved CAD system classified 90% of malignant lesions with very few false positives and without human intervention. Current screening methods, which include assessment by radiologists, correctly detect 77–87% of cancers. The findings suggest that expensive, traditional CAD methods may be replaced by less expensive deep learning methods that are currently being used to recognise objects – such as dogs and cars – in traditional images, to help radiologists detect more cancers. However, the authors cautioned that so far, they were only able to test their method on a small dataset of images with proven cancers.
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Eight signs your pharmacy computer is under attack
Don’t rely too heavily on antivirus software, says Guild
19th March 2018
The Pharmacy Guild has raised the alarm on the risk of cyber attacks against community pharmacies.
It says one in three pharmacies are not adequately protected. Pharmacies also have a legal requirement to report privacy breaches.
“Just having antivirus software is not sufficient in this day and age. Businesses need to be aware of the different types of cyber threats and take adequate measures,” it says.
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19 March 2018
Is rapid mass spectrometry coming to your GP clinic?
A new form of mass spectrometry promises to identify antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and provide clinically actionable results in under a minute.
MALDI mass spectrometry has been used to identify bacteria and fungi since the 1990s, but the new technology, called REIMS, dramatically cuts the processing time.
Remarkably, REIMS can identify antibiotic resistant bacteria with around 87% accuracy, something which the existing technology cannot do.
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Building blocks for better security
- Simon Thorpe
- The Australian
- 10:08AM March 21, 2018
With every major data breach, more and more personal information, especially passwords, become available to cybercriminals. Consumer security fatigue mixed with massive proliferation of online services, such as banking, healthcare, social media, gaming, news, insurance — and the need has never been greater for improved account security. Better protection but without huge friction. Users want to be secure, but they also want easy access to their applications.
There is evidence to support this. In the last 24 months, three billion records were lost online. In 2016, the number of US data breaches tracked an all-time record high of 1,093 and in 2017, the number of breaches rose to 1,579. Many of these end up in the weekly news cycle, which is raising awareness with consumers that they need to better protect themselves online. Two-factor authentication (2FA), an additional layer of security that makes it harder for attackers to gain access to a person’s devices and online accounts, has seen a significant increase in activity in the last year.
While robust measures to prevent customers’ data being compromised is important, businesses must also understand that people want to log into their accounts without hassle.
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Cambridge Analytica controversy: Australian political parties ramp up data campaigning
By Fergus Hunter
20 March 2018 — 6:29pm
It's election time and armies of political party volunteers are deployed to suburban streets across Australia to campaign for their candidates.
But instead of going to the effort of hitting every home, the volunteers pull out tablets or phones and open an application pinpointing the residences where they will find the swinging voters they need to win over.
A few clicks and the app goes deeper, containing a goldmine of valuable information about the person: their personal characteristics, the issues they care about, their declared political leanings.
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Big Tech not the only entity with your personal data on tap
- The Australian
- 12:00AM March 22, 2018
Peter Van Onselen
Facebook has been rocked by revelations that a firm working on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign harvested and allegedly misused millions of members’ data in pursuit of political advantage.
An investigation by Britain’s Channel 4 revealed Cambridge Analytica executives boasted they could use social media data to entrap politicians and engage in what can be described as potentially nefarious campaign techniques.
People post all sorts of information about themselves and their attitudes towards everything from consumer products to political issues on social media, but generally they do so communicating with a circle of online friends. Revelations that political actors are now using that information via complex algorithms to target their campaigns at voters raises a variety of privacy concerns as well as questions of ethical usage.
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Labor raises HFC reliability as Foxtel reported to be ditching network
The Australian Labor Party has raised doubts about the reliability of the Telstra HFC cable network after it was reported that Foxtel would not be using HFC for transmission any more, but moving to satellite.
Labor shadow communications minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement that Foxtel was planning to ditch what she described as "(Prime Minister) Malcolm Turnbull's HFC network" due to concerns about reliability.
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Enjoy!
David.
