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
With the Senate Inquiry now happening this issue is going to be around for a while I believe! Of course a new Health Minister may upend almost everything but we have the same one - so let's see!
----- Opt-Out News Start.
My Health Record: Police access to require court order
Proposed legislation will require permanent deletion of My Health Record when requested
The government has introduced a bill that it says will strengthen the privacy provisions of the My Health Record system by requiring a court order before an individual’s health information is disclosed to police.
Health minister Greg Hunt this morning introduced the My Health Records Amendment (Strengthening Privacy) Bill 2018 in the lower house.
The My Health Record system has faced heightened scrutiny over its privacy provisions since the beginning of what was initially a three-month period for individuals to opt-out of having a record created. Hunt has since extended the opt-out period until November.
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Privacy push over e-health record data
10:07am Aug 22, 2018
Police and government agencies will need a court order to obtain patient data from the controversial electronic health records system under legislation proposed by the health minister.
Greg Hunt introduced the bill on Wednesday to the lower house following talks with the Australian Medical Association and Royal Australian College of General Practitioners over privacy concerns with My Health Record.
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August 19 2018 - 3:30PM
Changes to My Health Record date
Lucy Slade
People living in rural and remote areas around Australia are being encouraged by the Australian Digital Health Agency to create their own My Health Record.
There will be an opportunity for people to test it out during the extended opt out period which now ends on November 15.
CEO Mark Diamond said having a My Health Record could be a real lifesaver for people in the bush who don’t always have easy access to healthcare services.
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Poll – August 20, 2018
My Health Record: staying in or opting out?
- Opting out (72%, 106 Votes)
- Staying in (28%, 42 Votes)
Total Voters: 148
----- Non Opt Out News i.e. All The Rest!
Government to act on all recommendations from health data review
22 August 2018 — 12:00am
Talking points
- The review came after ACT failed to give key data to the productivity commission in 2017
- The report made nine core recommendations
- There have previously been 175 recommendations from data reviews since 2012
A review of ACT Health's data failures has found staff were not fully aware of the impacts of poor data or told about the benefits of quality data.
The system-wide data review was ordered by Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris in February 2017 after the department failed to provide figures on its emergency department to the Productivity Commission due to concerns over accuracy.
It came after six previous external reviews and two auditor general reports on ACT health's data since 2012, culminating in 175 recommendations.
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ACT Health to build 'single source of truth' data repository
Will consolidate 250 different systems.
ACT Health has started building a single repository to unify its data holdings following a system-wide review of the territory’s health data management processes.
The “single source of truth for all data requirements” is one of nine key recommendations from the review [pdf] accepted by the government earlier this week to improve data governance, collection and management.
The review had been order by Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris last year after ACT Health was unable to provide the Productivity Commission with figures on emergency department performance because of concerns with the accuracy of its data.
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Safer hospitals could save $1.5 billion a year but “existing IT systems don’t do enough”
Lynne Minion | 22 Aug 2018
Safer patient care in Australian hospitals could save the health system about $1.5 billion a year, a Grattan Institute report has found, with the researchers calling for the overhaul of the “failed” hospital accreditation system and technology experts claiming health IT needs to improve.
The Safer care saves money report says one in nine hospital patients suffered a complication, costing public hospitals more than $4 billion a year and private hospitals more than $1 billion a year.
Beyond the benefits to patient outcomes, improving quality of care would save taxpayer dollars and relieve an over-burdened system, report authors Professor Stephen Duckett and Professor Christine Jorm found.
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Why consulting Dr Google first could be a good thing
By Justine Landis Hanley
20 August 2018 — 5:51am
How do you diagnose a patient who has turned up to the emergency department?
You check their vital signs, their heart rate, their temperature. You ask them what brought them in today, what they are feeling; you check their prior conditions, medications, allergies. Based on what they say, you order relevant tests; blood is sometimes drawn, x-rays taken.
Patients have often been discouraged from looking up their symptoms online. But new research, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, has found consulting ‘Dr Google’ before presenting at the emergency department could improve interactions between patients and their treating physician.
A survey of 400 adult patients who presented at emergency departments at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne and Austin Health between 1 February and 31 May last year found that over a third had looked-up their problem online beforehand.
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Dr Google: not such a dodgy doctor after all
Authored by Cate Swannell
MOST patients who search their symptoms online before presenting to an emergency department (ED) have improved interactions with their treating doctor, and their internet search does not adversely affect their compliance with prescribed treatments, according to research published in the MJA.
A 51-item purpose-designed survey was administered to 400 adult patients who presented to EDs at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne and Austin Health between 1 February and 31 May 2017.
A total of 196 (49.0%) indicated that they regularly used the internet for health-related information; 139 (34.8%) reported searching for information on the problem for which they had presented to the ED.
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'Frustrating and depressing': coroner says NSW could reduce overdoses
19 August 2018 — 12:00am
Real-time tracking of patients' prescription medication to stop doctor and chemist shopping and reduce overdoses would be introduced under a NSW Labor government.
The Opposition will today announce its election policy to implement the system, which the state's deputy coroner has said should be made a priority in NSW.
Coroner Harriet Grahame last month recommended that "urgent consideration is given to raising the priority for the introduction of Real Time Prescription Monitoring (RTPM) in NSW".
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NSW push for real-time monitoring to reduce prescription drug misuse
The NSW opposition has announced plans for a real-time prescription monitoring system in an effort to curb growing opioid deaths, but the State Government is clear in its belief that a national approach is needed.
State Opposition Leader Luke Foley wants NSW to follow its coroner’s advice that real-time prescription monitoring is needed ‘as a matter of urgency’. (Image: Dean Lewins)
Australian deaths related to prescription drugs now outpace deaths from illicit drugs, with the majority attributed to opioids and other prescription medications at high risk of misuse.
‘Around 600 Australians die every year from prescription drug overdoses. This is something we can help prevent in NSW,’ NSW Shadow Minister Health Walt Secord said. ‘Real-time prescription monitoring will be a tool for doctors and pharmacists to make safer decisions about whether to prescribe or dispense high-risk medicine.’
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Firms very poor at handling post-breach communications, book claims
Companies involved in 14 major recent data breaches in Australia and the rest of the world — including human resources outfit PageUp People — did not even achieve a passing grade for the way in which they handled post-breach communications, the authors of a new book on breaches say.
Co-authors Peter Coroneos and Michael Parker said in a statement that the fallout from the poor management of the breaches included senior executive resignations, parliamentary inquiries, loss of customers, significant share price, revenue and business valuation reductions, litigation, damages and compensation orders and general lingering brand damage from an increasingly distrustful public.
Coroneos is a former leader of the Internet Industry Association and is now regional head of the non-government organisation, Cyber Security Advisers Network. Parker is a brand management and communications professional and is managing director of Praxis Communication.
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Biometrics: Govt plays down concerns over mass surveillance, private-sector access
Legislation could allow for additional biometric types to be collected
Officials from the Department of Home Affairs have sought to assuage concerns that a proposed national facial recognition service could lay the basis for mass surveillance.
The government currently has two bills before parliament — the Identity-matching Services Bill 2018 and the Australian Passports Amendment (Identity-matching Services) Bill 2018 — which are part of creating the legal infrastructure for the new system.
The Commonwealth, state and territory governments have endorsed the idea of a national, federated system for facial identification and verification, which could draw on the driver’s licence data held in different Australian jurisdictions as well as other sources of face images including passport and citizenship data.
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Why this radiologist's report gets 1/10
With patients accessing medical reports online, it's time for doctors to review what they write
Skeptical Scalpel
22nd August 2018
I received an email a few days ago. It has been edited for length and clarity.
"I would like some advice please. I am a 46-year-old male with an off and on cough for 4-5 months. I have never smoked. After my primary care physician examined me, he ordered a chest X-ray.
A few days later I got a call from the doctor who said my X-ray was normal. I was happy to hear that, but I am enrolled with My Chart, which allows you to review your results online.
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Smartphone a pocket watch on your mental health
Smartphone apps for monitoring disease have continued to proliferate. Along with apps available to monitor diabetes, heart disease and other physical ailments, an app is under development in South Australia to assist with the early diagnosis of mental illness.
Niranjan Bidargaddi, associate professor of personal health informatics at Flinders University, has been collaborating with Susan Murphy, a specialist in statistics and computer science from Harvard University in the US, on the MindTick app.
This app, Dr Bidargaddi said, continuously monitors patients by using data from their phones. For one element of the app, patients are asked three or four questions at random times, three or four times a week. A notification pops up on their phones, and they are asked how they are feeling.
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Primary seeks to raise $250m as it switches strategy
Primary Health Care is tapping the market for $250 million as it hits the re-set button following a strategic review and to fuel its push to diversify its funding source away from government.
The company (PRY) unveiled the plan for the raising after revealing it had swung to a reported net profit after tax of $8.9m following last year’s loss of $516.9m.
Primary told investors that $140m of the raising would be invested over three years in medical centres to increase capacity, while $150m would be spent over five years on pathology infrastructure.
The company also said it was in exclusive talks to acquire an operator of day hospitals in a potential $140m deal, which would include an upfront payment of $75m.
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Humans against machines a futile distraction
- By Karl Redenbach
- 9:15AM August 20, 2018
Despite the well documented productivity promises, artificial intelligence (AI) carries a somewhat uneasy reputation. Even the very mention of AI can bring up discussions about job losses or even an existential threat to humanity.
There’s no doubt the concept of AI scares a lot of people. It’s been set in our minds ever since Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were introduced in the early 1940s, and over the last few years has continued to accelerate at an astonishing rate, culminating in Sophia being the first robot to receive citizenship.
It’s important to understand that, for now, much of the AI solutions available today don’t replace human intelligence. Rather, they complement our inherently human intelligence that really hasn’t been replicated in a tech stack, at least, not yet.
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2062: Toby Walsh says robots will rule the world
A new species is building strength to take over the planet. Get ready for Homo digitalis to supersede Homo sapiens, relegating us to a virtual existence where we surrender our bodies and park our consciousness in a digital world.
They are already among us, handling military weapons, medicine, insurance and legal systems. You may know these creatures better as artificial intelligence.
Toby Walsh’s new book, 2062: The World that AI Made, reads like a horror story. Walsh is no futurist foisting hunches from a vivid imagination on us. He is professor of artificial intelligence at the University of NSW and a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
He says the new machine species is poised to replace us, much as Homo sapiens superseded Homo neanderthalensis, the Neanderthals, about 40,000 years ago. We don’t know why the Neanderthals disappeared and whether it was directly because of humans. A combination of reasons is put forward. Walsh says that despite sharing 99.7 per cent of our DNA with Neanderthals, humans had one big advantage: language. (This view has been challenged, with some researchers saying Neanderthals were capable of speech.)
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Artificial intelligence is gearing up to have greater emotional impact
- By Sophie Kleber
- 1:00AM August 25, 2018
Annette Zimmermann, vice-president of research at Gartner, proclaimed in January: “By 2022, your personal device will know more about your emotional state than your own family.” Two months later, a study by the University of Ohio claimed its algorithm was better at detecting emotions than people were.
Artificial intelligence systems and devices soon will recognise, interpret, process and simulate emotions. A combination of facial analysis, voice pattern analysis and deep learning already can decode human emotions for market research and political polling purposes. With companies such as Affectiva, BeyondVerbal and Sensay providing plug-and-play sentiment analysis software, the affective computing market is estimated to grow to $US41 billion ($55.8bn) by 2022, as firms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple race to decode their users’ emotions.
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DTA sees 100% staff turnover in 18 months
Almost as many staff as are employed by the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency — 342 — quit the organisation in the last 18 months, a freedom of information request has revealed.
This includes the organisation's first full-time chief executive, Gavin Slater.
The FoI request, first reported by InnovationAus.com, revealed that 340 staff had left DTA during the last 18 months from December 2016 to June 2018.
The DTA had 342 staff on its rolls at the end of June 2018.
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NDIS IT systems to face official probe
Inquiry kicks off.
A parliamentary inquiry will be conducted into the IT systems underpinning the National Disability Insurance Scheme in the wake of recent issues with stability.
The NDIS ICT systems inquiry will look at the infrastructure used by the National Disability Insurance Agency to deliver services to both participants and care providers.
It was quietly referred to the Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme last week and follows a month-long outage affecting staff connectivity to the Department of Human Services network.
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IXUP to showcase secure data collaboration technology at 2018 Healthcare Leaders Forum
20 August 2018: Secure data and trusted collaboration company IXUP Limited (IXUP) (ASX: IXU) will showcase how the Australian healthcare industry can address the data collaboration challenges faced by many healthcare organisations through the use of its innovative software environment.
Speaking at the 2018 Healthcare Leaders Forum on 21-22 August at the Swissotel in Sydney, IXUP Chairman, Tim Ebbeck, will discuss the importance of secure data and how researchers and healthcare providers can use trusted data collaboration to discover insights into patterns of patient care across the medical ecosystem - without compromising patient privacy or data security. His presentation on 22 August is titled: Better Healthcare Outcomes Through Collaboration: Securely Connecting Sensitive Data Sets.
Open data sharing, which facilitates the free exchange of medical tests, results, and information among institutions, patients, and providers, is expected to improve healthcare and lower costs. It’s already changing the world of oncology by collecting, storing, and sharing genetic data. However, there are enormous risks associated with open data sharing.
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Citadel Group smashes $100 million milestone thanks to record contract wins
The Citadel Group has cracked the $100 million revenue milestone thanks to a record number of contract wins across its key verticals.
The Canberra-headquartered managed service provider generated $108.5 million in revenue for 2018 financial year ending 30 June, up 9.8 percent. EBITDA was also up 13 percent thanks to a focus on scalable solutions that don't require significant incremental resources, while net profit was up 26 percent to $19.4 million.
Chief executive Darren Stanley praised the progress of the company's Citadel Information Exchange, a cloud-based software solution for enterprise information management, after signing up 10 new clients to long-term contracts in the past 12 months and generating more than $68 million in new opportunities.
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NBN Co makes Stephen Rue its new CEO
Replaces Bill Morrow.
NBN Co will promote its chief financial officer Stephen Rue to lead the company, replacing Bill Morrow who leaves at the end of this month.
Though the network builder had engaged a search firm to look externally for a suitable candidate, it wound up promoting from within.
“Given the unique nature of the NBN access network and the Australian telecommunications environment, with the end of the build phase only two years away, the Board concluded that an internal candidate with firsthand experience of driving change and improvement throughout the company would be best placed to help ensure all Australians have access to fast broadband by 2020,” the company said in a statement.
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NBN Co answer to HFC problem: repeat fix that failed
NBN Co, the company rolling out Australia's national broadband network, apparently believes that repeating something will result in a different outcome. Nothing else can account for the fact that the company this week decided to again replace equipment at the premises of a resident in South Australia for the second time, in the hope that it would solve the problems on his NBN HFC connection.
Chris R. (as he prefers to be known), a resident of the suburb of Paralowie, has been having issues with his HFC connection for a long time. For nearly two months, he has been trying to work out, along with his retail service provider, why his HFC NBN connection only provides slow and unstable speeds.
He told iTWire he had experienced similar speeds no matter whether it was day or night. On 29 June he switched ISPs, from Telstra to Aussie Broadband "in the hopes the issue was related to not enough CVC by the old RSP on my POI (point-of-interconnect)".
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Huawei, ZTE banned from Australian 5G networks
Govt says security risks too great.
Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE have been banned from supplying equipment for 5G networks in Australia.
“We have been informed by the government that Huawei and ZTE have been banned from providing 5G technology to Australia,” Huawei Australia said in a statement to Twitter.
“This is a extremely disappointing result for consumers.
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DOCSIS 3.1 good, but long-term aim has to be fibre: claim
Enabling DOCSIS 3.1 on the HFC network would be a good thing in the short term, but the longer game will always be a full-fibre given its longevity, tech experts have told iTWire.
NBN Co, the company rolling out the national broadband network, announced on 7 August that it begun to enable the technology on the network as HFC activations are stepped up in coming months.
Dr Mark Gregory, an associate professor in network engineering at RMIT University, said the move to DOCSIS 3.1 was a positive step that would provide new features, capabilities and improved performance.
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Enjoy!
David.
