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
A really quiet week it seems with continuing discussion on just where the PCEHR is going and what might happen with the election coming closer and closer.
Enjoy the read and we will be back next week.
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Expedition to promote e-health records
30th Jul 2013
NATIONAL E-Health Transition Authority clinical lead Dr Mukesh Haikerwal will make an impromptu trip to a remote WA town to promote e-health after a GP called for the system to be scrapped in the national media.
Dr Haikerwal confirmed he would make the trek to Geraldton, about 400km north of Perth, after Dr Edwin Kruys was quoted in The Australian saying the personally controlled electronic health record “will be added to the global scrap heap of IT failures” and called for it to be abandoned.
“I always listen,” Dr Haikerwal told MO last week.
“I have the ability to improve and bring confidence to the system, and, my god, we need to do that — this is the way to do it.
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Health files online
July 30, 2013, 7 p.m.
PATIENTS will soon be able to have pathology and diagnostic imaging results added to their eHealth records on the internet.
Health Minister Tanya Plibersek said the federal government will spend $8 million to upgrade medical software used by doctors to put records online.
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Personal electronic health records: the start of a journey
James Reeve, Robert Hosking, Yvonne Allinson
Summary
Technology is poised to drive dramatic change in the way healthcare is delivered. Many countries are using health information technologies to improve the safety of healthcare and reduce costs.
There is an evolving capability for health information to be accessed and exchanged between healthcare providers in real time.
Shared electronic health records are increasingly seen as having a key role in facilitating access to and exchange of data, promoting engagement with self-management, and supporting continuity of care.
Sharing electronic health records with consumers supports the move to more informed patients becoming active partners in their own health care.
Consumers can access their own health information, contribute to their health record and interact more effectively and efficiently with the health system.
Key words: drug information, electronic prescribing
Aust Prescr 2013;36:70-3
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Telstra invests in electronic health record specialists IP Health
Media Release
02 August 2013
Telstra has finalised an investment in Australian electronic health record specialist IP Health, which provides medical practitioners with access to complete patient information on their smartphones and tablets.
IP Health’s core product, Verdi, gives hospital clinicians and administrators a single view of patient information aggregated from multiple systems in a hospital. It extracts information in real time from a hospital’s existing paper or electronic databases, enabling information to appear to derive from a single source for simultaneous sharing.
Telstra Ventures Managing Director, Matthew Koertge, said the investment in IP Health aligned to Telstra’s strategy of developing new growth businesses and would build capability in Telstra’s Health portfolio.
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Telstra finalises eHealth investment
The investment in IP Health builds on Telstra’s health portfolio and its strategy to develop new growth businesses
- Stephanie McDonald (Computerworld)
- 02 August, 2013 11:42
Telstra has completed an investment in electronic health operator IP Health, which provides patient information to medical practitioners on their smartphones and tablets.
Telstra did not disclose the amount it invested in IP Health. It builds on Telstra’s health portfolio and its strategy to develop new growth businesses, according to Matthew Koertge, Telstra Ventures’ managing director.
“This investment fits with Telstra’s new health business unit by complementing our existing mobility and hosting solutions and expanding our offering to hospitals. IP Health will be an important asset as we continue to build capability in this area,” Koertge said in a statement.
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Qld and NZ to share health data
Summary: The governments of Queensland and New Zealand have signed an agreement to share health data, IT procurement, strategies, and planning.
Queensland Premier Campbell Newman and New Zealand Health Minister Tony Ryall have signed an agreement for cooperation and shared planning between their respective healthcare systems.
Announced today in Wellington, the Arrangement for Collaboration on Strategic Health Initiatives will specifically see the governments share data and strategies in relation to IT procurement, assessment, and implementation; rural and indigenous health systems; telehealth; the promotion of healthcare and the distribution of information on prevention; services efficiency; and information on business, finance, and human resources in healthcare.
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Medical Board eyes doctors' Twitter posts
2 August, 2013 Antonio Bradley
Errant or inappropriate posts Twitter and Facebook could soon attract the wrath of the Medical Board of Australia as it expands its realm to include doctors' rapidly expanding digital lives.
Draft changes to the medical profession's Code of Conduct — the cornerstone document used to hold doctors to account — include explicit warnings about the use of social media.
The draft code, which is to be released within days for public consultation, stresses that its edicts no longer apply only to "traditional face to face consultations".
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eHealth records leading to reduced errors
Posted Tue, 30/07/2013 - 12:37 by Fran Molloy
As the adoption of the personal e-health record (PCEHR) in Australia starts to snowball, we are likely to see fewer medication errors and improved diagnostic and treatment decisions according to a recent global survey of 3,700 doctors.
However, there is still concern among health professionals that PCEHR adoption is too slow because Australian eHealth records are opt-in (rather than opt-out), with the AMA this week calling for the establishment of a PCEHR clinical advisory group.
Health Minister Tanya Plibersek announced on July 17 that around 520,000 patients and 5000 health organisations (including GP practices and hospitals) had registered for the PCEHR, and over 16 million health documents had been uploaded to the system.
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AMA repeats calls for DORA national roll-out
30th Jul 2013
THE AMA has repeated its call to have an online service that helps GPs monitor patient use of controlled drugs rolled out nationally, amid reports of deaths from overdoses of a powerful prescription painkiller.
The ABC reported that at least three people had died in three months from overdosing on fentanyl in NSW country towns.
The drug is indicated for chronic pain that does not respond to non-narcotic analgesics and is available as a patch for slow release.
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Orion Health rolls out converged cloud
IaaS will reduce costs, speed delivery time
- Hamish Barwick (Computerworld New Zealand)
- 02 August, 2013 12:01
New Zealand health technology solutions provider Orion Health is introducing a converged cloud service to support its global managed health services.
The company provides solutions to clinicians in more than 35 countries and helps facilitate data exchange between hospitals and health systems.
HP has provided Orion Health with an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) called CloudSystem Matrix. Designed for private and hybrid cloud environments it will allow the company to build a catalogue of applications for deployment.
Orion Health sells stake in HealthLink, settles two court cases
Orion Health CEO Ian McCrae says he was offered a good price for the company's 52.4 percent stake in HealthLink
- Randal Jackson
- 24 June, 2013 22:00
Orion Health has agreed to sell its majority stake in HealthLink to HealthLink management, averting a court case scheduled to be heard next week.
Orion held 52.4 percent of HealthLink.
Two separate High Court proceedings were scheduled: the first over royalty payments and the second over differing views between the shareholders of the direction of HealthLink.
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The PCEHR
27/07/2013 by
Today I had a couple of patients asking me about the PCEHR. I advised them that our practice is ready and able to play this game but there were so many unresolved issues that we would not actively promote this to anyone. Two of the main issues are:
- Each Healthcare Provider signs a participation agreement with the Government – it is sixteen pages long but one paragraph stands out. It states: “You grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and license-fee free, worldwide, non-exclusive licence (including a right to sub-license) to use, reproduce, copy, modify, adapt, publish and communicate (including to other healthcare provider organisations and to organisations that store health information) material you have uploaded to the PCEHR system for the purposes of the PCEHR system”
To me this poses an unacceptable risk to the patient
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PCEHR: Who is the customer? (slideshow)
When starting up a project, service or business, an important question is: Who is the customer? This is not always the one who pays the bills. There may be other users or stakeholders. I’ve said it before: Everybody has to be on the same page for a project to be successful.
I’m not sure who the customer is in the case of the PCEHR. At first glance this seems to be the health consumer, as they have some control – unlike clinicians. Most GPs agree on one thing: the current PCEHR is not making their jobs easier or adding value. Are they customers too? Are there others?
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Big Oz needs telehealth
26 July, 2013 Dr Moyez Jiwa
Telehealth has been pitched as the answer to the rural doctor shortage, but many GPs remain wary of being denied the option to physically examine patients. 6minutes spoke to GP and researcher Dr Moyez Jiwa, from Curtin University, about his recent study of GPs and their attitudes to doctoring from afar.
What do GPs think of video consultations?
We found one-third of GPs wanted to take on video consultations for follow-up patients, a third were unsure, a third were not in favour of it. Australian-trained GPs were generally not keen, compared to IMGs, and we think that's because there's not an established telehealth culture. But arguably there should be because our country is huge.
What are the problems with Australia's video consultation model?
A major issues is funding. It's not funded for GPs' consults. We also need more evidence this is effective and safe. The big concern was physical examination. There's a debate about whether history alone is enough and in what circumstances. It also gets complicated if the patient has multiple morbidities.
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Mercy Health saves costs with networking upgrade
The not-for-profit rolls out software-based wide area network optimisation
- Hamish Barwick (Computerworld)
- 02 August, 2013 15:58
Queensland health provider, Mercy Health, has saved costs and improved data replication since the deployment of a software-based wide area network (WAN) optimisation solution.
According to Mercy Health's IT operations manager, Mohamed Elalfy, a hardware based WAN product would have cost three times more over a four-year time frame.
Based at Rockhampton, the organisation delivers services to rural and central Queensland.
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Online cannabis, ecstasy sales booming
Date July 31, 2013
Daniella Miletic
Social Affairs Editor, The Age
Researchers examining the ways illicit drugs are bought and sold through the internet have discovered a sharp rise in the number of people using the online market place to sell Australians cannabis and ecstasy.
The study, by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, is the first to monitor sellers of illicit drugs to Australians. It found that while the internet does not yet compare to the backstreets as a place to get drugs, the amount of online sellers – both domestic and international – is increasing.
From August 2012 to February 2013 researchers reported a 32 per cent jump in the number of sellers using the Silk Road marketplace – a marketplace much like eBay where transactions are encrypted, anonymous and made using the online currency Bitcoin – to sell cannabis, ecstasy and MDMA. They found the number of sellers, mainly international, rose by 92 to 374. Domestic retailers had increased by about 22 per cent, to 44, by February.
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Australia's biggest supercomputer is off and racing
Date August 1, 2013 - 8:46AM
Farz Edraki
By the time you finish reading this, Australia's biggest supercomputer will have carried out 144,000 trillion calculations. Or 1200 trillion calculations a second.
Officially launched on Wednesday at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) computing centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, the supercomputer - dubbed ''Raijin'' after the Japanese god of thunder, lightning and storms - will be used by researchers to run complex scientific models.
At 70 tonnes, Raijin is capable of performing the same number of calculations in one hour that 7 billion people would have taken 20 years to perform using calculators. Whereas an average laptop has four central processing units, the supercomputer has 57,472.
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Watson and the future of cognitive computing
IBM's Watson made a memorable TV debut in 2011, and some of the concepts behind it may a more deep-going impact on the world
- Rohan Pearce (Computerworld)
- 30 July, 2013 14:30
"I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine," game-show contestant Ken Jennings wrote after his game show loss to IBM's Watson supercomputer.
"...Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad [Rutter] and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of 'thinking' machines."
"'Quiz show contestant' may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last," Jennings concluded.
Watson's 2011 victory was a publicity triumph for its creators at IBM. But according to the company, it also symbolised the birth of a new era of intelligent systems – or 'cognitive computing'. Cognitive computing, according to IBM, involves systems that interact naturally with human, learn from their experiences and generate and evaluate evidence-based hypotheses, says
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Archaeopteryx 'not the only bird-brain'
- by: John Ross
- From: The Australian
- August 01, 2013
ARCHAEOPTERYX'S contested status as the world's first bird is looking a little shakier, after researchers discovered that its contemporaries were smart enough to fly.
US scientists who analysed Jurassic fossils believe some “paravian” dinosaurs, which were previously considered land-bound, had big enough brains for flying.
They include the scavenger Tsaagan – part of the feathered dromaeosaur group which also included the fearsome Velociraptor – and long-legged “troodontids” including the Zanabazar.
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Enjoy!
David.
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