Technological Progress Is Really Off And Rolling At An Amazing Pace!

 

Last week I had the misfortune to have what I have been led to believe was a small myocardial infarction, which I am happy to report I have apparently survived.

In true doctor fashion I had been ignoring some minor chest discomfort until last Sunday week when a doctor friend insisted I go an be assessed at the local teaching hospital (RNSH) at which I had worked decades ago. My, have things changed!

Once I confessed to the emergency doctor that I had some chest discomfort things rolled on fast.

From 6:30pm to 7:30 I was examined, blood tests done and some potent analgesics were given while a cardiograph was done and assessed. – till now much as I expected might happen.

Then things ramped up a notch as I swiftly found myself in a catheter lab surrounded by huge TV screens as various lines were inserted into arteries and veins, and a team of experts assembled. (In the dark, surrounded by screens, the staff looked quite ghost-like!)

Despite the powerful ‘happy juice’ I recognised the screens were now filled with images of my heart and my coronary arteries – with the right one being apparently blocked part way down.

No worries – soon artery was dilated and a stent (tiny tube) was put where the block has been.

More pictures to ensure all of the heart was now supplied with blood.

An hour later (9:30) back in my more comfortable bed – the others in the cath are bloody hard – and very comfortable with no chest pain and the knowledge that all of my heart now has plenty of blood to keep on pumping with!

48 hours later I has kicked out of hospital, with some new tablets, to check in with my cardiologist in 4-6 weeks and to stay in touch with my GP!

So here I type to you – gentle reader – amazed at the tech in the catheter lab, the catheters and the stents – all of which are so new and so powerful in the hands of our experts we are really lucky. We all know just how much work has gone into developing all this and proving it up, but I reckon it was worth it.

All this ignores  the amazing advances I witnessed during my stay in the use of ultrasound to image almost anything from eyes to prostates - just saying nothing of MRI and all the other innovations!

Well, I for one, is grateful, as is my 75 year old ticker, for all these advances! They all really seem to work and keep us going! (I remember the days when the "heart attack" was 2 weeks rest and 2 weeks light duties! - times have really changed.)

Thanks to all for the apparent miracles!

David.

 

I Suppose This Is Big News – But It May Just Be Another Damp Squid!

This appeared last week:

30 August 2023

Lift-off: governments sign digital health deal

Government Interoperability

By Cate Swannell

Reform of Australia’s healthcare system is on the way. See what's in the fine print.

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The new Intergovernmental Agreement on National Digital Health 2023-2027 has been signed by the Commonwealth and all eight states and territories, and quietly released into the world. 

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler was the first to sign, on 31 May, and WA’s Minister for Health Amber-Jade Sanderson was the last, on 26 July. This locks every government into a commitment to make interoperability across sectors and healthcare jurisdictions a reality. 

The signatories have committed to an overall financial contribution of $64.5 million per annum split via a cost-shared formula agreed to by the Health Chief Executives Forum in 2022-23. 

The Commonwealth will bear 50% of the cost, currently $32.25 million per annum, with the rest split between New South Wales (15.71%), Victoria (12.73%), Queensland (10.22%), WA (5.36%), South Australia (3.51%), Tasmania (1.11%), the ACT (0.88%) and the Northern Territory (0.48%).  

Funding for the ADHA and the operation of the MHR will be met by the Commonwealth.  

The parties to the agreement are now formally committed to developing and providing the following services: 

• Healthcare Identifiers Service – a national system that assigns a unique 16-digit number to people, healthcare providers and healthcare organisations, allowing electronic systems across the national healthcare system to identify them correctly, and associate information with the right patient and provider at the point of care. The Healthcare Identifiers Act 2010 and the Healthcare Identifiers Regulations 2020 set the framework and rules for the HI Service. 
• The modernisation of My Health Record. 
• Implementation of the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan. 
• Updating and modernising the National Health Services Directory 

• Standards and informatics – the Australian Digital Health Agency’s work on standards and informatics for key products and services to support interoperability, connectivity and solutions for information exchange’. 
• ePrescribing comprised of three software components: practice software used to generate the prescription; prescription delivery service (PDS), which incorporates a prescription exchange (PE) and holds the prescription; and pharmacy software that retrieves the e-prescription and is used to dispense the prescription. 
• Real Time Prescription Monitoring – a nationally implemented system designed to monitor the prescribing and dispensing of controlled medicines with the aim of reducing their misuse in Australia. 
• National Authentication Service for Health – makes it possible for healthcare providers and supporting organisations to securely access and exchange health information, using public key infrastructure certificates. 
• National Clinical Terminology Service – easier, consistent and more meaningful use of clinical terminologies in healthcare. It is responsible for managing, developing and distributing national clinical terminologies and related tools and services to the Australian healthcare community to support their adoption, use and maintenance of terminology. 
• New standard-related services. 
• Healthcare Information Provider Service – a middleware product offering seamless integration with systems including patient administration systems, clinical information systems; laboratory and radiology information systems; aimed primarily at supporting large-scale digital health environments typically found in organisations such as hospitals and diagnostic service providers. 
• National Secure Messaging Network – will define a national standard for a messaging solution that can be implemented by clinical information and secure messaging systems to enable secure, reliable and interoperable exchange of messages including text-only messages, stand-alone clinical documents or messages containing text and clinical documents between Australian healthcare providers. 
• Provider Connect Australia connects healthcare organisations with their business partners (such as Primary Health Networks, Medicare and health services directories) to streamline updates of the services they provide and the practitioners providing them. 

Three specific delivery partners have also been “invited to participate in the governance arrangements to support collaboration and implementation of the Agreement” – the Australian Digital Health Agency, Services Australia, and Healthdirect Australia. Other delivery partners, as identified by the parties to the agreement, can also be invited to participate. 

More here:

https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/lift-off-governments-sign-digital-health-deal/97850

I Have to say this seems like a pretty big agenda and a look back a few years hence will be interesting to see how much progress has been made.

It seems to me there is a layer of practicality and hard work here which suggests those doing the work will need all the time they are allocated!

It needs to be pointed out that there is very little new here and what is evident is continuation of work, some of which has been underway for many years. The NASH has been evolving and emerging since Adam was a nipper in short pants!

Does anyone actually remember one of these actually reaching finality?

David.

 

AusHealthIT Poll Number 712 – Results – 03 September, 2023.

Here are the results of the poll.

Should Australia Be Legislating Against Disinformation / Misinformation Or Trusting Citizens To Know / Tell The Difference Between Truth And Falsehood?

Yes – We Need Laws                                                     21 (54%)

No – Rely On People Who Know The Difference      15 (41%)

The Answer Is Far Above My Pay Grade                       2 (5%)

Total No. Of Votes: 38

A mixed outcome suggesting that a small majority of readers feel laws are needed but many are not sure!

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

A good number of votes. But also a rather mixed outcome. 

2 of 38 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

 

Medical Start-Up Lands $2m For Device To Let People Speak Again!

This appeared a few days ago:

Medical start-up lands $2m for device to let people speak again

3.30PM – Aug 24, 2023

Tess Bennett

Medical tech company Laronix, which has created a device that lets people who have had their larynx removed speak again, has raised $2 million in seed funding.

The round was led by VC firm Scale Investors and includes participation from Dr Elaine Saunders and Dr Peter Blamey the co-founders of hearing aid company Blamey Saunders, and Kristy Chong, the ModiBodi founder who sold her company for $140 million last year.

Laronix was founded by Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi in 2020 after a decade of researching solutions for voice loss caused by the surgical removal of larynx (laryngectomy) as the result of throat cancer.

The start-up has gained FDA and TGA approval for its wearable electronic voice prosthesis that monitors the respiration signals a person’s body makes when they are trying to speak and uses AI to produce a voice.

Having secured seed funding, Laronix will expedite the launch of its first products in the US and Australia.

Dr Ahmadi said the products give wearers the option to speak with a male or female voice, as well as sing.

“Our journey started when a permanent voice-loss patient emailed our research group and said I am a singer, and my voice is my life and I am going to lose it forever, his genuine plea really affected me,” she said.

“I felt the immense pain of his condition, and the fact that there hasn’t there been any successful advancements over the last 40 years to improve these patients’ lives, especially when the suicide rate for laryngectomy patients is sadly so high.”

Article is found here:

https://www.afr.com/technology/the-tech-deals-you-need-to-know-20230614-p5dgkc

To those who need it this technology would clearly be an utter godsend! Great stuff, but I have to say it seems like a really tiny amount of money?

David.

The Story Of NVIDIA And Its Growth, Diven By AI, Must Be The Tech Story Of The Year!

 

This appeared last week.

How Nvidia became the world’s most important company overnight

By James Titcomb and Matthew Field

August 25, 2023 — 8.23am

The three mid-ranking Silicon Valley engineers behind Nvidia had just $US40,000 ($62,350) between them when they started the company three decades ago, fuelled by a belief that 3D graphics would change the video game industry.

Now, it costs the same amount to buy just one of Nvidia’s microprocessors, and it can’t make enough of them.

The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has made Nvidia perhaps the world’s most important tech company and secured it a value of more than $US1.2 trillion.

Its latest boost came on Wednesday night, when the business revealed quarterly profits had climbed by a staggering 843 per cent in a year alone, up from $US656 million to $US6.2 billion.

Sales in its data centre business, which reflects demand for its top AI chips, climbed by 141 per cent in just three months, surpassing even Wall Street’s lofty expectations.

The best news for investors was that the company predicted the party would continue, forecasting another leap in sales in the third quarter of this year.

Shares, already at a record high, rose by 6.5 per cent as markets opened on Thursday and to some, the only question is how high can it can go.

The latest rally cemented Nvidia’s spot as a world-leading tech giant.

Big dreams

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive and principal founder, always had big ambitions.

The company decided to focus on video games in the 1990s when Huang observed demand for increasingly advanced computer graphics and predicted a need for drastically more powerful chips as games moved towards more immersive and 3D worlds.

When Nvidia’s share price hit $US100, Huang had the company’s logo tattooed on his arm.

But even he would have failed to see the AI rush that boosted his personal fortune to $US42 billion.

Nvidia’s work on computer graphics in the 1990s led it to invent the graphics processing unit (GPU), a type of microchip dedicated to computer gaming and video tasks. GPUs, however, also excel at other types of number crunching.

Nvidia thrived during the cryptocurrency booms of 2017 and 2021, as its processors proved to be highly proficient at the high-powered mathematics needed to mint new Bitcoins.

It also rode a brief flurry of excitement around the “metaverse”, the virtual reality championed by Mark Zuckerberg.

However, the AI boom has eclipsed all that.

Large language models such as ChatGPT and Google Bard require thousands of GPUs, both for their initial “training” and for the subsequent interactions known as inferences.

Almost every company and government is falling over themselves to invest in AI.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which operate the giant cloud computing data centres on which AI models generally run, are placing orders worth billions of dollars with Nvidia.

To a degree, Huang is fortunate his video game chips are so well suited to AI, but his allies reject suggestions he simply stumbled upon a pot of gold.

“He was one of the early people to think about it (AI) and study it,” says a former Nvidia executive.

“Jensen had big ears, he was listening to what was happening, he was experimenting and investing in how they could tweak these GPUs to be better at this stuff.

“He took a decision to bet significantly on AI in around 2018.”

Today, the company has competition from chip making giants AMD and Intel but enjoys a huge head start. So much so that Nvidia is now practically synonymous with AI itself.

Vastly more here:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/how-nvidia-became-the-worlds-most-important-company-overnight-20230825-p5dzbd.html

NVIDIA really seems to be one of a kind, and it is really hard to know just what comes next, but kaking ti to a market cap. Of US$1.2 Trillion is an indicator of considerable success, but surely also some hype?

It is an amazing success story but I am sure only one of a few if we manage to keep to planet on an even keel for the next 20 years or so. There are some real existential risks out there sadly!!

David.

 

Is There Any Way Such Incompetence And Incapacity To Act Can Be Excused?

This saga popped up last week.

Climate crisis

Scientific journal retracts article that claimed no evidence of climate crisis

Publisher Springer Nature says 2022 article ‘not supported by available evidence’ as editors launch investigation

Graham Readfearn

@readfearn

Sat 26 Aug 2023 01.00 AEST

Last modified on Sat 26 Aug 2023 01.01 AEST

One of the world’s biggest scientific publishers has retracted a journal article that claimed to have found no evidence of a climate crisis.

Springer Nature said it had retracted the article, by four Italian physicists, after an internal investigation found the conclusions were “not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors”.

Climate sceptic groups widely publicised the article, which appeared in the European Physical Journal Plus in January 2022 – a journal not known for publishing climate change science.

Nine months later the article was reported uncritically in a page one story in the Australian newspaper and promoted in two segments on Sky News Australia – a channel that has been described as a global hub for climate science misinformation. The segments were viewed more than 500,000 times on YouTube.

The article claimed to have analysed data to find no trend in rainfall extremes, floods, droughts and food productivity.

“In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet,” the article said.

Several climate scientists told the Guardian and later the news agency AFP that the article had misrepresented some scientific articles, was “selective and biased” and had “cherrypicked” information.

After those concerns were raised, Springer Nature announced in October it was investigating the article.

In a statement Springer Nature said its editors had launched a “thorough investigation”, which included a post-publication review by subject matter experts.

The authors of the article also submitted an addendum to their original work during the course of the investigation, the statement said.

“After careful consideration and consultation with all parties involved, the editors and publishers concluded that they no longer had confidence in the results and conclusions of the article,” the journal said.

“The addendum was not considered suitable for publication and retraction was the most appropriate course of action in order to maintain the validity of the scientific record.”

A retraction note appearing on the article says concerns were raised “regarding the selection of the data, the analysis and the resulting conclusions of the article”.

The note says the article’s conclusions “were not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors”.

More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/26/scientific-journal-retracts-article-that-claimed-no-evidence-of-climate-crisis

That a reputable journal publisher takes more that 18 months to notice that an off-topic article it published was untrue evidence-free rubbish really makes it hard to understand just how we poor ignoramuses at the end of the information food chain are to discern fact from fiction etc.

When you think about it the implications of all this are really scary – to say the least! Even if material is not taken down surely it can be flagged a possibly misleading in a week or two. No properly conducted peer-review process gets it this wrong unquestioningly!

Springer this is just not OK! What do others think?

David.