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."
Note: Each
link is followed by a title and 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.
Nine more digital health services to use NHS Login
Nine more
digital healthcare services will use NHS Digital’s single sign-on process, NHS
Login.
Owen Hughes –
28 August 2019
Amongst these
are GP service access platform Patient Access and the NHS eReferrals service
(e-RS).
This will
take the total number of products and services using NHS Login to 14, which NHS
Digital labelled “a real leap forward” in enabling patients to access digital
healthcare services from a single, secure log-in system.
The next nine
services to use NHS Login include:
Evergreen
Life – a GP online services app connected with three major GP systems
in England
The
Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights has issued
guidance for managing malicious insider threats to protected health
information.
The
guidance targets the security risks of Individuals within healthcare
organizations—they are trusted to securely protect health information, but if
employees become disenchanted, they could become a malicious insider who could
harm the organization.
Malicious insiders, HHS advises, can be anyone and include
IT staff, customer service representatives, managers and senior executives, and
they can leak or destroy information. A malicious insider also can use
available information to assess medical records of celebrities for financial
gain, or use patient data to commit fraud or identity theft.
This
past February, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a proposed
rule—CMS-9115-P—to support the MyHealthEData initiative to improve patient
access and move electronic data exchange and care coordination.
CMS
seeks to make data more useful and transferable using secure and standard
machine readable formats while reducing burdens on health care providers,
complement the goal of achieving healthcare interoperability.
However,
faxes remain the most commonly used way to communicate medical information,
says John Nebergall, senior vice president and general manager at J2Global, a
cloud services and digital media firm.
Mobile and Modern Working – Advisory Series, August 2019
By Jennifer
Trueland – Digital Health
Smartphones
are an essential part of the lives of most people worldwide yet for NHS staff,
mobile working is not seen as a consistent feature. Jennifer Trueland reports
on how and when that might change.
According to
Phillipa Winter, mobile technology can make a huge difference to patient care,
but only if you make it as easy as possible for staff to use it.
The CIO at
Bolton NHS Foundation Trust is a firm believer in user-sensitive design, so
much so that she effectively delayed the roll-out of a mobile electronic
observations solution at the eleventh hour because she knew that as it stood,
it simply wouldn’t wash with her workforce.
The
problem is Bolton has been operating with a virtual desktop environment, both
in hospital and community settings, where staff can literally tap to log on,
then tap to log out.
NIST Seeks Feedback on Shoring up Telehealth, RPM Cybersecurity Risks
To address
the cybersecurity risks posed by remote patient monitoring and other telehealth
tools, NIST is asking tech vendors to provide comment and help create a
reference architecture.
August 29,
2019 - NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence released
a request for comment on Friday asking for industry feedback on ways to support
and secure telehealth remote patient monitoring within the healthcare sector.
The
planned project is just the latest NIST effort designed to address the risks
posed by telehealth technologies. In November
2018, NIST asked for industry feedback on challenges health delivery
organizations face when securing RPM and other telehealth platforms.
Its
efforts have received support from industry groups like the American
Medical Informatics Association.
Digital platforms provide the healthcare industry with great opportunities to empower the patient.
Health informatics is about more than just data — it’s an opportunity to empower the patient.
That’s the view of industry specialist Alexandra Ehrlich, who says health care would do well to follow the lead of the retail and banking sectors when it comes to embracing digital platforms.
Australia was already taking a step in the right direction with the national digital health My Health Record system, she said.
US-based Ehrlich, a biostatistician and a Principal Solution Consultant with Oracle Health Sciences, visited Australia for the recent digital health, e-health and health informatics conference HIC 2019.
She was a finalist in the Health Informatics Society of Australia’s (HISA) digital health awards.
Her nomination in the ‘Don Walker award – Industry’ category recognised her work in data management, CX (customer experience) solutions and artificial intelligence supporting patient experience, as well as a White House AI (artificial intelligence) challenge on clinical trial matching.
At HIC 2019, Ehrlich was a guest speaker and panellist in a workshop on ‘Personalising precision medicine: Bringing the consumer perspective to precision medicine’.
Ehrlich’s presentation discussed the challenges and opportunities technology addresses in capturing pivotal health, environmental and socioeconomic data for patients.
“It’s really about decision support,” she said after the conference.
“Providers, what they want technology to do is help them get the right information at the right time.
“And often information has been implemented just to collect data.
“Keeping the providers in mind really allows us to keep in mind what they find valuable when doing that job.
“It’s really being able to use that as a tool.
“In precision medicine especially there’s a lot of information that comes from a lot of different places that’s hard to make sense of.”
Being able to integrate that into a platform that was easy to interact with was key, Ehrlich said.
A topic of concern, highlighted at HIC 2019, among healthcare professionals was how the industry was leveraging innovative technologies.
“I don’t think clinicians are concerned they’re going to be replaced but they’re going to be overridden,” Ehrlich said.
“We talked about, at the precision medicine seminar, we had a really good discussion about how to utilise AI today.
“One of the best cases we found connected that to the White House and the project we had around resource allocation.
“Using AI to get patients to the right resources.
“It was decision making, it wasn’t diagnosing.”
Ehrlich said a large part of this was focusing on the patient or consumer view, and considering what information they needed to make healthcare decisions.
“When a patient is sick or my child is sick, I’m trying to decide where to take them. Do I want to take them to the emergency room, do I want to take them to a GP?” she said.
“That data is there, that information is there.
“It’s really the consumer experience part.
“We do this with retail, we do this with banking.”
Ehrlich said the kinds of digital tools employed in the retail and banking sectors were a nice fit for health care.
“At Oracle, we’re lucky we have a large portfolio across industries, we’re able to use our best parts from other industries and bring them in in a thoughtful way,” she said.
“That’s part of my goal being here [in Australia] was to connect with what’s going on in the healthcare field here.”
Looking at My Health Record — how the project has been received and the next steps now that implementation is well underway — was a part of that work.
Ehrlich said a big focus was on how to maximise the technological investment for the benefit of the patient.
“I think what was really interesting to me was the different levels of conversations that are happening here around how to empower the patient.
“Because the way the system is set up and through a project like My Health Record, there’s such an opportunity to empower the patient and connect to their health care.
“But in the US, because of the way we’re set up, we’re not quite there yet.”
Ehrlich said a staged implementation of My Health Record was the right approach.
“I think the logical next step … [is] to discuss the level of detail we want in the record.
“That has to be driven by what we find beneficial for the patients.
“I think there’s going to be a period of let’s experience this and see what works and what doesn’t.
“From there I think the next step will be what new data needs to be in there in order to impact care.
“I think it’s really about remaining patient-centric and really creating a process that keeps them front and centre.
“I think we all acknowledge that.
“But because of the way we’ve been operating for a long time, especially with technology, we haven’t really created a standard methodology to do that.
“I think that’s where the opportunity is to stop, take a deep breath and say, in order for this investment to be really beneficial and in order to be cognisant, we have to say the patient is really front and centre.”
