This blog is totally independent, unpaid and has only three major objectives.
The first is to inform readers of news and happenings in the e-Health domain, both here in Australia and world-wide.
The second is to provide commentary on e-Health in Australia and to foster improvement where I can.
The third is to encourage discussion of the matters raised in the blog so hopefully readers can get a balanced view of what is really happening and what successes are being achieved.
Quote Of The Year
Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"
or
H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
Media release - Secure messaging to replace outdated fax machines
20 December 2018: The future of secure messaging and interoperability across the Australian health sector was discussed at a recent workshop held by the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) in Sydney, attended by more than 50 state and federal government officials, industry stakeholders and international experts.
One of the ADHA’s key priorities is to help healthcare providers across Australia communicate quickly, easily and securely, and to reduce the sector’s current reliance on outdated technologies like the fax machine.
For consumers, secure messaging means that that when they are being treated by different doctors in different locations and transferred from one doctor or hospital to another, their doctors and healthcare providers can securely communicate and provide safer and better care.
At the second Secure Messaging Industry Collaboration Workshop held in Sydney on 27 November 2018, Medical Software Industry Association President Emma Hossack, ADHA Chief Operating Officer Bettina McMahon, and Dr Nathan Pinskier, Clinical Advisor to the ADHA’s Secure Messaging Program, signed a communique committing to further collaboration on the adoption and implementation of secure messaging.
Several clinical software vendors are already providing secure messaging solutions to specific markets within Australia’s healthcare system — but the aim going forward is to implement a nationwide solution that embraces existing solutions and unifies them seamlessly.
“Secure messaging is a foundational capability enabling interoperability and safe, seamless, and secure information sharing between healthcare providers,” Ms McMahon said.
“Nationwide adoption of secure messaging will enhance the security, safety and efficiency of clinical information sharing across all sectors — ultimately aiding the provision of better healthcare for the community.
“To realise this goal, through events like the Secure Messaging Industry Collaboration Workshop, the ADHA is working collaboratively with industry, suppliers of secure messaging solutions, and clinical software vendors to reduce existing barriers to adoption and to provide pragmatic and implementable solutions.”
A key priority for the ADHA is the creation of a transparent, national directory of service providers that can be used for securing messaging.
At the workshop, participants agreed to continue working towards this goal, with the target of delivering a minimum viable product by June 2019.
The end result will be the equivalent of a national ‘yellow pages’ for all registered healthcare providers, enabling them to easily contact each other.
Working groups were also established to help identify and troubleshoot barriers to the adoption of secure messaging, improve the clinical experience, and to develop an industry alliance participation agreement and trust framework.
Ms McMahon said discussion at the Secure Messaging Industry Collaboration Workshop was highly constructive — and the future of secure messaging is in good hands.
“The Secure Messaging Industry Collaboration Workshop brought together some of Australia’s and the world’s best and brightest minds in healthcare IT,” she said.
“We will continue to work together collaboratively to strengthen and develop secure messaging and interoperability within the healthcare landscape, for the benefit of all Australians.”
All I can say was that it must have been a pretty slow news day to have this put out!
Just in passing I had an appointment with a neurologist during the week and was really impressed technologically with what I saw.
He was able to access test results, reports and the actual images from both the local private and public hospitals.
He conducted a lot of complex tests with results captured and then placed in his letter to the referring doctor.
He used electronic speech recognition to dictate his letter back to the referring doctor with the need to correct with the keyboard very infrequently.
For his purposes the myHR is an irrelevant waste of time as he already has the tech support he needs to do all he needs to serve his specialist practice.
Of course he also has a fax machine for those not quite at his level
David.
PS - Remember the rest of the world is also still working on the fax 'problem'.
More than 7 in 10 hospitals still use fax to transmit
records. (Getty/IPGGutenbergUKLtd)
Health systems use numerous methods to exchange patient medical records, but
providers continue to rely heavily on the old-fashioned approach of mail or
fax, according to new federal data on interoperability.
Nearly three-quarters of non-federal acute care hospitals routinely use fax
or mail to receive summary of care records from providers outside their system,
according to new data released
by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. Two-thirds of
health systems use fax or mail to send records.
Paper-based methods outpaced electronic transmission, particularly in
receiving records. More than 4 in 10 systems said they “often” use mail or fax
while 27% said they often use a standalone health information service provider
like DirectTrust.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma
has pushed the industry to adopt electronic methods for data exchange, calling
on developers help “make every doctor’s office in America a fax free zone
by 2020.”
Note: I have excluded (or marked out) any commentary taking significant funding from the Agency or the Department of Health on all this to avoid what amounts to paid propaganda. (e.g. CHF, RACGP, AMA, National Rural Health Alliance etc. where they were simply putting the ADHA line – viz. that the myHR is a wonderfully useful clinical development that will save huge numbers of lives at no risk to anyone – which is plainly untrue) (This signifies probable ADHA Propaganda)
The
combination of IoT sensors and data lakes become a powerful tool for
pattern analysis, but has serious privacy implications for the consumer
and the employee in the workplace.
n late October, I had the privilege of moderating a panel on the subject of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Unbound
Miami, a boutique (but excellent) trade show that specializes in
showcasing disruptive technologies such as cryptocurrency and
blockchain.
The show and the panel was highly engaging with some really great speakers,
including Dr. Alex Liu of IBM, Anthony DeLima of NEORIS, Prof. Sara
Rushinek of University of Miami Business School, and Ylan Kazi at
UnitedHealth, and I'm glad I am finally able to show it to you.
Since
the show, I have been thinking a lot about the subject of machine
learning in the cloud, and how it is likely to impact our lives in the
near future. There are many aspects of this technology that have
potentially very positive benefits, but as with any disruptive
technology, there are pitfalls.
-----
The
Department of Home Affairs says it would take "considerable time and
resources" for it to determine how many agencies across Australia's
three tiers of government have accessed metadata held under the nation's
data retention laws.
Responding to Questions on Notice, Home
Affairs pointed out another of the loopholes that gives agencies, not on
the list of 21 enforcement agencies, the ability to access metadata.
"Section
280(1)(b) of the Telecommunications Act 1997 creates an exemption to
the general prohibition against the disclosure of metadata for
Commonwealth, state, or territory entities that are not enforcement
agencies," Home Affairs said.
"The authorities that can utilise this exemption are not specified."
-----
On
December 7, 2015, an upbeat Malcolm Turnbull unveiled his first major
policy initiative since becoming prime minister: the 'Ideas Boom', a $1
billion package of measures designed to boost innovation. "We
want to be a culture, a national culture of innovation, of risk-taking"
Turnbull, who couldn't stop talking about 'disruption' or the need to
be 'agile' back then, declared at a press conference at the CSIRO in
Canberra. Nearly
three years to the day from the unveiling of that policy, the federal
government's retreat from innovation, and standing within the tech
community, sank to its nadir.
On December 6 encryption laws,
universally condemned by local startups and global tech giants alike,
were passed by parliament, with bipartisan support, on the last sitting
day of the year.
------ https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/australia-s-100-million-scam-problem-the-threat-has-become-personal-20181220-p50nfd.html
Australia's $100 million scam problem: The threat has become personal
Australians have lost more than $100 million from scam activity so far this year and a shift in approach from criminals means the threat has become more personal.
While phone and internet schemes have traditionally focused on exploiting "greed" through promises like prize winnings and vouchers, cybersecurity experts say Australians have increasingly been targeted with sophisticated communications that use their actual details and systems to gain access to funds.
"The reason this has been successful is they’ve been either able to impersonate a domain name or compromise an account. People are becoming compromised often without necessarily knowing that they have been," says Barracuda Networks' senior sales engineer, Mark Lukie.
A number of Queensland patients have had their personal details used to illegally access and steal drugs and medications in hospitals and health centres.
Key points:
Queensland Health Ombudsman investigated nearly 40 complaints about drug theft in the last financial year
Patient details were fraudulently used to steal the restricted or controlled drugs in multiple cases
More than three-quarters of the matters occurred in the most populated regions, Brisbane and the Gold Coast
The Queensland Health Ombudsman investigated nearly 40 complaints about drug theft in the last financial year, and labelled the practice "a serious risk to public health and safety".
In multiple cases, patient details were fraudulently used to steal the restricted or controlled drugs.
"For example, one practitioner working in a public health facility stole medication through an automated electronic dispensing system by entering legitimate patient details; the medication — which cannot be accessed without a patient's information — was neither prescribed nor dispensed to the patient, but taken by the practitioner for personal use," the ombudsman found.
Thousands of records containing sensitive information such as HIV-status, past abortions and mental health issues are being requested by the police every year – and doctors and privacy experts are deeply concerned about it.
The battle for greater privacy protection around My Health Record (MHR) data appears to have been won, with the government pushing through legislative changes in November requiring police to get a warrant in order to access MHR data.
What has largely escaped the public’s attention thus far is that there are two other, equally-sensitive datasets held by the Department of Human Services that federal, state and territory police forces have been quietly accessing for years.
The police are not legally required to get a warrant to obtain Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) data.
An investigation by The Medical Republic recently revealed that the police were requesting around 2,600 MBS and/or PBS records every year.
Digital technology is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, and in the pharma industry as it searches for ways to find new drugs, while cutting costs and reducing expensive trial failures. 2018 will be remembered as the year when technology such as AI began to catch on in healthcare and pharma, reports Richard Staines.
The UK government’s life sciences tsar, Sir John Bell, set the tone for 2018, when he went on record to say that artificial intelligence (AI) could save billions of pounds for the NHS.
Bell told the BBC that researchers at an Oxford hospital have AI technology for diagnosing heart disease that could shave £2.2 billion from the NHS’ pathology spend.
Another AI system developed by a company called Optellum could allow more than 4,000 cancer patients a year to be diagnosed earlier.
This could save £10 billion if adopted in the US and EU, according to the company’s science and technology officer, Dr Timor Kadir.
The UK government has also backed AI-based health research including five new centres for artificial intelligence in health, focusing on areas including pathology, radiology, and imaging.
After 31 January 2019, every Australian, including all people living with HIV (PLHIV), will have a My Health Record (MHR) account established by the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), if they have not opted out.
MHR is an online summary of your key health information, operated by the Australia Digital Health Agency, which once activated can include information from GPs, specialists, pharmacists, pathology labs or diagnostic imaging providers. The main benefit of MHR is all your health information will be in one place. For example, prescriptions, medical conditions, allergies, test results, medicines you’ve had dispensed by your pharmacist and your visits to your doctor, referral letters between your doctors, and GP visit and hospital summaries.
We’ve heard from a range of people including PLHIV that they’re excited by and will benefit from MHR. These are PLHIV who are ageing, those living with comorbidities and complex care needs, and likely to have numerous hospital admissions. PLHIV are eager to own their health information and MHR will empower them in shared decision process making with their doctors, when seeing multiple healthcare providers. MHR will reduce the duplication of tests and waiting times for test results, as well as the risk of adverse events, and could save your life in an emergency.
Concerns remain about some primary and secondary uses of MHR. People who choose to remain in the MHR are providing informed consent for the linking of their health data, which is the ‘secondary use’ of MHR data. PLHIV have also shared concerns about data control and ownership of health data. You can choose to have a MHR but make a decision not to share your health information for research and clinical trials. While the Framework to guide the secondary use of My Health Record system data has been published, the first release of secondary use data will not occur until at least 2020 under the custodianship of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).
Digital hospitals improve health for Queenslanders: report
Hafizah Osman | 18 Dec 2018
A new report has backed Queensland’s digital hospital program, confirming that it is improving healthcare and patient outcomes in the state.
The report, tabled by the Queensland Audit Office (QAO), highlighted the benefits of the digital hospital program in Queensland, while making recommendations to improve governance of the future rollout.
Key findings from the report identified that as a result of the digital hospital program, Queenslanders face improved health service delivery and patient outcomes, as well as a reduction in unplanned readmission rates.
It found that medical staff can access clinical information faster and that patient records are more legible.
Minister for Health and Ambulance Services Steven Miles said the digital hospital program is “one of the most significant health advances in decades”.
Note: I think the author was reading a different report to the copy I saw. This is the most glass half full report I have ever read!
Over the past year and a half the dialogue around privacy, and the social implications of violations of privacy, has shifted significantly, according to Trevor Hughes. Partly that shift has been driven by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, said Hughes, who is the president and chief executive officer of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).
However, beyond that particular case, he thinks that increasingly there has been recognition “that we leapt headlong into the digital economy, to the digital revolution, and we’re sort of cleaning up some of the issues that that’s created now,” the IAPP CEO told Computerworld.
“Privacy is transitioning,” Hughes said. “There is this recognition that it is no longer just about individual harm. It’s not about ‘have you violated my data’ or ‘how have you used my data in a way that I wasn’t expecting or I find offensive or problematic’. There are societal level concerns associated with privacy now.”
That includes a recognition that “violations of privacy, misuse of data create real challenges for open and fair elections, democracies generally, fundamental freedoms broadly – things like free speech and other things,” he added. “Even freedom of thought and choice.”
The federal government has finally released its revamp of Australia’s national digital economy strategy to seize the potential economic benefits presented by new technology.
The strategy, dubbed Australia’s tech future [pdf], has been developed over the last 15 months in collaboration with businesses, academia and the community to help develop digital skills and deliver better services.
It replaces the existing digital economy strategy, which was last revised in May 2016 after first being released by the then Department of Communications in May 2011.
Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews said the strategy – which was originally slated for release in first half of this year – identifies where Australia’s efforts should be focused in the years ahead to amplify the digital economy.
A Shorten Labor government would investigate the tech giants’ secretive algorithms, with the party revealing key aspects of its technology agenda should it wins next year’s federal election.
The ACCC last week flagged a review into Google and Facebook’s well-guarded algorithms, and now Labor has followed suit. The party used its national conference in Adelaide to pass a motion that AI technology needs to be safe, trustworthy and under the ultimate control of human decision-makers.
The motion, which passed on Monday, said a Labor government would implement reporting mechanisms to “help track how privately devised and managed algorithms impact on the income and prices generated on digital platforms, including ride sharing and food delivery, to help prevent exploitation and worsening inequality.”
Psychologists’ home details posted online in HBF breach
Cathy O'LearyThe West AustralianWednesday, 19 December 2018 5:01AM
WA’s biggest health insurer has admitted to a privacy breach that led to the private addresses of psychologists being published on a TripAdvisor-style healthcare website.
HBF said this week that it had notified the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and written to more than 7000 psychologists after realising it had provided some personal addresses to the online directory Whitecoat.
It conceded that the mistake had potentially put at harm psychologists who worked from home.
Chief executive John Van Der Wielen also confirmed that his organisation had ended its association with Whitecoat — the patient rating site it helped relaunch in July 2016 with fellow insurers Bupa and nib.
He said the decision was not related to the privacy breach, which fully came to light a few weeks ago when an upset psychologist complained that their personal address had been published on Whitecoat.
The AMA wants hospitals to inform GPs about a patient’s unplanned admission and discharge within 24 hours.
Concerned that patients are being let down by ineffective communication between hospitals and GPs, the organisation has released updated guidelines to improve transfer-of-care arrangements.
AMA president Dr Tony Bartone says communication efforts are inconsistent, with too many transfers not meeting best practice.
“Unfortunately, missing discharge summaries and slow — or no — communication too often lead to poor patient outcomes,” he said in a statement.
Evidence shows that the risk of readmission rate is 79% higher within seven days of discharge, and 37% higher in the following month, for patients who are sent home without a discharge summary from hospital.
When a GP spoke out over discharge summaries, it led to real change
Dr Katrina McLean called for major improvements to discharge summaries – and her local hospitals responded.
In March this year, Dr Katrina McLean and two colleagues called for improved clinical handovers between hospitals and GPs.
Nine months later, and as more GPs called for urgent change, Dr McLean – who is also an Assistant Professor at Bond University – told newsGP that speaking out has led to direct improvements in communication with hospitals on the Gold Coast, where she works.
‘There is a long way to go but, locally, I feel we are in a much stronger position than we were 18 months ago,’ she said.
Dr McLean used her March article, published in MJA Insight, to illustrate the impact on GPs of poor-quality or late discharge summaries to the Chair of the Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service, who took the issue to the board.
The result? A commitment that local hospitals would work towards better communication with GPs. -----
There’s an increasing concern among scholars that, in many areas of science, famous published results tend to be impossible to reproduce.
This crisis can be severe. For example, in 2011, Bayer HealthCare reviewed 67 in-house projects and found that they could replicate less than 25 percent. Furthermore, over two-thirds of the projects had major inconsistencies. More recently, in November, an investigation of 28 major psychology papers found that only half could be replicated.
Similar findings are reported across other fields, including medicine and economics. These striking results put the credibility of all scientists in deep trouble.
What is causing this big problem? There are many contributing factors. As a statistician, I see huge issues with the way science is done in the era of big data. The reproducibility crisis is driven in part by invalid statistical analyses that are from data-driven hypotheses – the opposite of how things are traditionally done.
The arrest in Canada of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou could be a turning point in the struggle over who will attain technological dominance in the 21st century. For both China and the US, the contest is existential because whoever dominates cutting-edge technologies will also prevail economically and militarily.
The Chinese Communist Party shot itself in the foot when in 2015 and again in 2017 it passed laws obliging Chinese companies such as Huawei to act on any request to undertake intelligence work. Private as well as state-owned enterprises are now extensions of the party.
The laws were vital evidence for those who favoured banning Huawei from Australia’s 5G network, a ban now being copied by other Western nations. The 5G “fibre to the phone” network will be the control system for pretty much everything — at the heart of big data, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, the internet of things and much more, including weapons systems.
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
Happy Christmas to everyone for tomorrow. It has been a big year!
This week, the medical software industry of Australia put a very large and potentially game-changing stake in the ground, which may have a very positive impact on doctors (and patients) around the country – eventually.
Although not that well-funded – it’s still a relatively small group of local and global players – the local organisation has decided to employ a full-time CEO to up the stakes for both its members and the direction of digital health policy in the country.
If that sounds just a little ‘ho hum’, then stop and consider for a moment the context in which the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA) has made this decision.
Digital health technology, and concomitant health transformation, is starting to take in a lot of overseas markets. Some countries like China and Norway have determined already that they are going to lead the world in health innovation because health is so important to every country in the world.
Telemedicine researchers at Australia's national science agency, the CSIRO, have developed new video-streaming technology to help parents stay connected to their premature babies while in hospital.
A statement from the CSIRO said the technology allowed parents to watch live video of their babies using a mobile phone app. A trial of the technology is underway.
One of the women involved in testing out the technology, Samantha Hayden, who has pre-term twins Zachary and Sebastian, said she was happy to be able to see her babies whenever she wanted.
The twins spent the first weeks of their lives in The Townsville Hospital's neonatal intensive care unit.
Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei has launched an artificial intelligence-powered app that can enrich story time for people who are hard of hearing or deaf.
Known as StorySign, it is claimed to create an authentic reading experience. A statement from the company said the app would be available in Australia from February 2019.
Huawei Australia has struck a deal with Deaf Australia, a local charity, to encourage support and donations for those affected, and to offer the app to the Australian deaf community. The company is also looking to raise awareness of deaf literacy.
“Deaf children don’t learn to read in the same way as hearing children. Many struggle to learn how to read because they can’t match words with sounds," said Kyle Miers, chief executive of Deaf Australia.
Medicolegal tip: Should doctors video-record consults?
Dr Craig Lilienthal addresses doctors' fears that, if something goes wrong, they may be unable to defend claims brought against them
Dr Craig Lilienthal
18th December 2018
When I was a young GP in the small country town of West Wyalong in Central West NSW, no one asked me if they could take a video of their wife having their baby.
That’s probably because domestic video cameras didn’t exist at the time. That’s so long ago, I was the first GP in town to insist that fathers be present on these important occasions.
However, when I began undertaking medicolegal work with the MDU (a precursor of Avant) in the 1980s, a number of obstetricians expressed concern about fathers wanting to video the births of their children.
The obstetricians were worried that if they did anything wrong or if something went wrong, they would be unable to defend claims brought against them because a visual account of the procedure would be available to the experts and the courts.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is often touted as changing lives for the better, including in healthcare.
A recent Senate inquiry recommended Australia lead AI development and ethics.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists told the inquiry “[a] digital health future presents risks and opportunities for healthcare professions. The potential for automation is high…but there are some very clear limitations…”
How do we approach healthcare AI?
The American Medical Association recently released a policy on ‘augmented intelligence’. It covers advocacy on healthcare AI priorities, incorporating clinician perspectives, ensuring high quality initiatives, education on benefits and limitations, and exploring legal implications.
MIGA advocates on issues of digital health, including the Senate inquiry into My Health Record, the South Australian Enterprise Patient Administration System review and the Australian Digital Health Agency National Digital Health Strategy consultation. We also engage with the Australian Digital Health Agency and other stakeholders in working groups. The issues we raise include:
Ensuring digital health reflects healthcare realities
Augmenting existing initiatives to improve operation, utility and use
Ensuring regulation is fair and balanced, identifying potential implications when things don’t work as intended
Fragmentation of sources and information, inconsistency in use and ‘information overload’.
New CEO for the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre
The Board of the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Victor Pantano as the DHCRC’s new Chief Executive Officer.
Recently established, the DHCRC is an industry-led, academically powered leader of research and development in digital health, formed to create new opportunities for Australian business and society. One of the largest and most complex CRCs, it was established with an investment over seven years of $56m cash and $120m in kind from its 80+ partners, along with a grant of $55m from the Australian Government's CRC Program.
Dr Pantano will join the DHCRC from the University of Canberra (UC), where he is currently Associate Vice President – Innovation and Strategy, responsible for identifying, developing and negotiating strategic growth opportunities for UC. This has included working to support the growth of UC’s health faculty, together with its state-of-the-art health precinct. He brings a wealth of experience in business development, commercialisation and venture capital investment, underpinned by the creation of collaborations between universities and industry.
Over the course of his career, Dr Pantano has raised hundreds of millions of dollars across a variety of technologies and in a broad range of fields.
Join digital health leaders to discuss how you can leverage technology and improve the quality of care across Australia.
Attendees at this event will learn how to streamline the digital transition, futureproof their hospital, innovate for patient-centric care and engage stakeholders through change.
One of Australia’s earliest Docker adopters, the government-run health directories provider Healthdirect, wound up pulling the pin on the technology after six months.
It saw containerisation as a way to improve its speed to deliver enhancements and new services, and to ensure the infrastructure underpinning those services could keep up with user demand. It also believed the technology would free up developers’ time to focus more on improving customer-facing services.
In reality, however, containerisation became an expensive time sink as Healthdirect fought a “complexity and immaturity” in the production readiness of Docker.
National Clinical Terminology Service – Introductory recordings
The National Clinical Terminology Service (NCTS) at the Australian Digital Health Agency has published introductory level recordings about SNOMED CT-AU and the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT).
Webinars include:
1. Introduction to SNOMED CT-AU terminology
An introductory webinar (approx. 30 mins) that provides an overview of SNOMED CT-AU, its structure and content, purpose, use cases and more.
2. Introduction to the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT)
An introductory webinar (approx. 40 mins) that provides an overview of the AMT, its structure and coverage, purpose, use cases and more.
3. SNOMED CT-AU content hierarchy overview
A webinar (approx. 30 mins) that provides an overview of the content available within each of the SNOMED CT-AU hierarchies.
IT delays roll-out of National Bowel Screening Programme
Monday, 17 December 2018
eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth
Delays in developing the new National Screening Solution have pushed back the roll-out of the National Bowel Screening Programme to some DHBs.
Deloitte has been contracted for the initial planning and design phase of the IT system to support the new screening programme, with work expected to be completed in late July 2018.
A Ministry of Health Annual Review published this month says the completion date was extended until November 2018, but the initial design phase is not complete. This initial phase has a budget of $2.5 million and as of 30 June this year, its risk status was green-amber.
Australian healthcare researchers take too long to assemble data: report
Hafizah Osman | 21 Dec 2018
Despite an abundance of digital data in Australia, health and medical researchers are spending “several months and even years” when it comes to assembling data required for research, a recent study has found.
The Australian Researchers and Digital Health Australian Health Data Series: Volume 2 report identified that Australia holds high-quality, well-coded and valuable digital health data, but is not tapped to its full potential.
This has led to a direct impact on advances in both health and medical science, and the development of the health and medical technology and pharmaceutical sectors, it indicated.
The Federal Government's encryption law does not seem like smart politics, but then nothing about it seems particularly smart, according to developer Joshua Lund who works for the project developing the encrypted messaging app Signal.
In a blog post about the encryption law, which was passed by Parliament on 6 December, Lund said through the entire eight-year development of Signal, a project run by Open Whisper Systems which is the brainchild of well-known cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike, resistance had been encountered from people who struggled to understand end-to-end encryption or those who sought to weaken its effects, adding that this was not a new dynamic.
"We can’t include a backdoor in Signal, but that isn’t a new dynamic either," wrote Lund. "By design, Signal does not have a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, group memberships, group titles, or group avatars.
The Australian Cyber Security Growth Network and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute are planning to issue a report that will apparently provide "high-level case studies" of what the government's encryption law means.
Exactly what that means is open to debate, given that ever since the draft of the bill was issued on 14 August, we have seen plenty of commentary from eminently qualified people who have essentially said that the bill should be cremated as a public service.
AustCyber (now there's a catchy name for you) chief Michelle Price was quoted extensively by the website InnovationsAus as effectively saying that everything spoken and written about what is officially known as the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 was a load of ballyhoo.
Final government amendments to newly passed encryption busting laws rushed through parliament in the final hours of sitting this month will be subject to scrutiny by a joint parliamentary committee.
The joint committee on intelligence and security (PJCIS) on Monday commenced a review into the Telecommunication and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 following its passage through parliament earlier this month.
Michelle Rowland: "On every measure, the Liberals’ disastrous decision to adopt HFC has left taxpayers and consumers worse off."Supplied
The Australian Labor Party has questioned how the cost of the NBN Co's HFC build has increased by 64% since 2015, despite the fact that the number of premises being served by the technology has fallen by 37.5%.
Labor Shadow Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement on Thursday that the Federal Government needed to come clean on "the extent to which Australian taxpayers have been fleeced" due to the decision to use HFC as one of the technologies for "the second-rate NBN".
Spectrum management tricks turn fixed wireless into Fixed Wireless Plus.
NBN Co has announced a significant restructuring and relaunch for its fixed wireless services that will see the product reach for 75 Mbps downloads in the year 2020, as revealed by iTnews in August.
The re-launch is a child of urgent necessity and innovation.
The necessity is an ACMA edict to spectrum users in the 3.4GHz to 3.6GHz bands that requires a new interference management regime that includes specified downlink and uplink network configuration measures. The effect of that edict is that NBN Co will have to withdraw its current wholesale 25-50/5-20 Mbps products by the end of 2019.
The innovation is in what comes next: NBN Co claims it will be better at utilising its accessible spectrum and will have the potential to offer a 75/10 Mbps service in future.
NBN Co will have an additional three years to pay off a loan from the government intended to plug the gap between the cost of the NBN rollout and the cap on the total equity contributions from Canberra. However, the government would not reveal the financial impact of the decision.
The Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), released today, revealed that the government would modify its $19.5 billion loan agreement with NBN Co, extending its term by three years to the end of June 2024 and allowing the company to source up to $2 billion from private debt markets.
The MYEFO document states that the “financial implications of this measure are not for publication ... due to commercial sensitivities.”
Australia's ban on the use of 5G equipment from Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies will result in the cost of deploying wireless base stations being higher by anything from 15% to 40%, Huawei chairman Ken Hu says.
Hu, who is the rotating chairman of the company at the moment, told a media event in Dongguan, where Huawei has opened a new campus, that his figures were taken from a study titled The Value of Competition on 5G Network Deployment carried out by a company known as Frontier Economics. Journalists from AP, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, CNN, CNBC, Reuters, Fortune and Nikkei were among those present at the media event on Tuesday.
The cost of building an entire 5G network in Australia would be higher by several billion dollars, said Hu, adding that was what even worse was that the time for people to adopt and use 5G technology would be delayed.
Personal translator device brings us a step closer to Star Trek
By Cynthia Karena
17 December 2018 — 12:43pm
While we are not quite in Star Trek’s Universal Translator territory yet, where everyone’s spoken languages are translated and spoken in real time communication, Japanese technology company Logbar has created a voice-to-voice translating device called ili.
Speak English into ili ($US199 + shipping to Australia) and it translates and speaks in Japanese, Mandarin, or Spanish. More languages may come later.
Ili is small and lightweight at 42 grams, it can be hand held or worn with a neck strap and it’s incredibly easy to use. Press and hold a button to speak, and in under half a second your words are translated out loud.
