The Australasian Digital Health Institute (AIDH) has been chosen to host a new industry alliance aimed at embedding genomics across the local healthcare system.

The Industry Genomics Network Alliance (InGeNA) was launched today with 13 founding member companies in healthcare and life sciences and will be chaired by former NeHTA head of architecture David Bunker.

Albury Wodonga Health (AWH) plans to roll out DXC's Care Suite to replace several patient administration systems in use in its hospitals and mental health operations, the first step on a digital health modernisation strategy for the cross-border health service.

The solution, deployed on Microsoft Azure, will provide a consolidated view of patients across AWH, which straddles the Victorian and NSW border and services a catchment of 250,000 people. It includes two public hospitals, one in Albury and one in Wodonga, as well as a mental health service with an inpatient unit in Wangaratta, two residential aged care services in Beechworth, two community health services and a dental clinic.

The use of video conferencing and remote patient monitoring can cut costs for patients, but this is not necessarily so for healthcare providers, a new study has found.

Cost savings were predominantly found in reductions travel time but otherwise telehealth increased costs, albeit with improved care, the study found.

Clinical and billing software solution Medical Wizard is now connected to the My Health Record system and has developed functionality that enables My Health Record documents and standard clinical documents to be presented on the same page.

Melbourne-headquartered Medical Wizard, which markets to medical and surgical specialists and day hospitals, is the second of vendor to successfully complete new design work under the Australian Digital Health Agency's specialist industry offer.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending November 8: NHS Covid app bungle, US telehealth figures, digital surveillance in South Africa, telehealth app expands to Kenya, Scotland and Northern Ireland Covid app interoperable, predicting Covid with wearables, US federal health IT strategy, delivering care from home, cyberattacks hit hospitals, Teladoc finalises $18.5b Livongo merger

Fault in NHS Covid app meant thousands at risk did not quarantine
The Guardian ~ Alex Hern ~ 03/11/2020

A code error in the NHS Covid-19 app meant users had to be next to a highly infectious patient for five times as long as the NHS had decided was risky before being instructed to self-isolate.

In a week in which the US hit a milestone and recorded over 100,000 new COVID-19 cases in one day, there was far more positive news in these parts as Victoria recorded a full week with no new cases, in a very welcome sign that it has successfully cracked the second wave.

There will still be questions asked about the capacity of its test and trace regime, with the Victorian parliament's legal and social issues committee, chaired by cross-bench MP Fiona Patten, running an inquiry beginning on November 16.

Victoria's Maryborough District Health Service has rolled out Telstra Health’s Virtual Health Monitoring service to monitor patients remotely.

Virtual Health Monitoring is an integrated, at-home solution which allows patients to track and submit their pulse and oxygen saturation using a SpO2 pulse oximeter, temperature, blood glucose, weight and blood pressure.

Victoria's Latrobe Regional Hospital (LRH) has gone live throughout its inpatient services with the Sunrise electronic medical record from Allscripts, having rolled out the system in its emergency department in April last year.

The site is Allscripts’ first implementation of its EMR solution in Victoria and is also the first EMR in Australia to incorporate Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Clinical and practice management software vendor Zedmed has released an update to its Doctor's App that allows users to action test results straight from the app.

The app already allows users to access their appointments, patient information and histories, and active recalls. The appointment screen has also been given a re-design, Zedmed says.

New Zealand's largest primary health organisation ProCare has joined forces with Southern Cross Health Insurance to offer a virtual GP service called CareHQ seven days a week.

Video consults will be offered to patients when their own GP is not available or after hours and will be accessible by the patient on a CareHQ app or through My Southern Cross. GPs will use the video capabilities in the Indici practice management system.

Rachel Stephen-Smith has retained her position as the ACT's Minister for Health following the re-election of the Labor government last month.

Ms Stephen-Smith will continue to manage the ACT's COVID-19 response and will have oversight over what the government says is the largest expansion of health infrastructure in the territory’s history over the next four years, including expanding the Canberra Hospital and a new network of walk-in health centres.

Canadian software provider and acquirer Harris has added UK firm K2 Medical Systems to its maternity software business, joining Sydney-based Meridian in the growing portfolio.

K2's maternity ward software solutions are used in a number of public and private hospitals in Australia, including Mater, Monash Health, Healthscope, Gold Coast University Hospital and RPA Women and Babies/Canterbury Hospital.

Two NSW local health districts have gone live with the new enterprise-level medical imaging platform from Sectra, the first in the planned roll-out to 11 LHDs and specialty networks.

Westmead, Auburn, Blacktown and Mt Druitt hospitals in Western Sydney LHD and Nepean and Blue Mountains hospitals in Nepean Blue Mountains LHD are now live with Sectra's radiology information system and picture archiving and communication system (RIS-PACS), which has replaced a GE system.

The platform is closely integrated with other core clinical systems including the Cerner electronic medical record (eMR), patient administration systems and NSW's enterprise imaging repository (EIR), built by Fujitsu.

Former Labour Party leader and justice minister Andrew Little has been named as New Zealand's next Minister for Health in the Ardern government's new cabinet.

Infectious diseases specialist Ayesha Verrall has been fast-tracked into an associate ministerial position with a focus on public health, with Peeni Henare keeping his position as associate minister for Maori health.

Chris Hipkins, who took over the health portfolio from the gaffe-prone David Clark in July, retains his main position as education minister but has also been given a new portfolio overseeing the Covid-19 response.

An assessment by an independent dermatologist of Firstcheck's clip on lens for checking skin cancers using a smartphone has found it to be good to use by consumers to check suspicious moles.

Firstcheck’s dyplens device enables smartphones to capture clinical-quality photo of moles that can then be assessed online by doctors. The dyplens is a registered medical device in both Australia and New Zealand.

ASX-listed medications adherence technology developer MedAdvisor is hoping to raise $45 million to fund the acquisition of US-based patient adherence and engagement solutions vendor Adheris Health and expand its operations internationally.

MedAdvisor has partnered with Adheris since 2019 to offer digital adherence programs to Adheris Health’s pharmaceutical clients and across its retail pharmacy network.

BreastScreen Victoria (BSV) has gone live with its new digital medical record from Vitro Software and is now managing all of its patient assessment records at St Vincent’s BreastScreen Assessment Clinic digitally.

Clinical staff can now track a client’s assessment journey directly from their workstations using a fully digitised client journey board that colour-codes the client status in real time, helping to track client progress through the clinic.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending November 1: Renewed Ryuk threat warning for US hospitals, information blocking rules delayed, NHS Covid-19 app bugs, telemedicine for contact lenses, Alberta's $1.4b Epic roll-out, US VA's $16b Cerner roll-out, tele-assisted care, NHS health IT assessment criteria, France rebrands contact-tracing app, test result app for travellers

US hospitals warned of fresh wave of ransomware attacks
Information Security Media Group ~ Prajeet Nair ~ 29/10/2020

The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are warning hospitals about a fresh wave of Ryuk ransomware attacks that have recently targeted healthcare facilities around the country.

HHS delays data sharing regulation deadlines
Information Security Media Group ~ Marianne Kolbasuk McGee ~ 29/10/2020

Regulator says COVID-19 response stretching IT resources, making compliance challenging.

The Australian government's much-vaunted, much-plugged COVIDSafe app came under the spotlight this week as Senate Estimates hearings got under way in Canberra and the opportunity to grill health department officials on their COVID-19 response, including their thoughts on Victoria's contact tracing capabilities, presented itself.

Labor has heavily criticised the app since its release and its seems with good reason, as it doesn't appear to work very well. The opposition overplayed their hand a tad with claims that it had only found two positive contacts at a cost of $70 million, as that figure turned out to be vastly overinflated. Department of Health assistant secretary Caroline Edwards clarified that the app had cost $5 million to develop and maintain, with a further $6.95 million to plug it.

CERT NZ has issued a new alert concerning a global increase in Ryuk ransomware attacks on healthcare systems, following an advisory from US authorities about an imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals and healthcare providers.

A joint cybersecurity advisory was issued today by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about the threat, which reports say have hit four hospital groups so far this week, three in New York state and one in Oregon.

Auckland's MercyAscot private hospital group is now live with its new patient administration system from InterSystems, having gone ahead with the implementation in mid-May at the height of New Zealand's COVID-19 lockdown.

It is now looking forward to rolling out clinical functionality with the TrakCare electronic medical record at the end of next year, when it will be the first healthcare organisation in New Zealand to fully host its integrated PAS and EMR on Microsoft's Azure Stack hybrid cloud computing platform.

The former CEO of Medical Journal of Australia publisher AMPCo, Jae Redden, has been named the new chief executive of the Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA).

Ms Redden takes over from interim CEO Mark Upton, who has been holding the fort since February following the departure of former CEO Richard Lawrance.

There has been an increase in the number of clinical document uploads and views of the My Health Record, albeit from a low base, and the vast majority of GPs, pharmacists, public hospitals and pathology labs are now connected to the system, according to the Australian Digital Health Agency's annual report.

The agency says it has successfully met annual targets in terms of availability of the system and enhancements to it, although some of ADHA's other work programs have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the development of a implementation plan for nationally agreed interoperability principles.

The federal government's much-publicised COVIDSafe app has been criticised as a waste of time and money having only picked up 17 positive contacts, all in NSW, since its launch in late April, at a cost of close to $12 million.

Department of Health representatives told Senate Estimates in Canberra yesterday that the full cost of advertising the app was $6.95 million, with an extra $5m spent on developing it and subsequently improving functionality.

Auckland-headquartered medical software vendor Clanwilliam Health has appointed Mike Weiss as CEO, taking over from Michelle Creighton, who is stepping down after two years in the top job and more than 10 years in senior roles.

Mr Weiss previously served as deputy CEO and chief commercial officer of the business, which was formed in 2019 with the merger of secure messaging vendors HealthLink and Konnect NET. He served as CEO of the latter business, which markets the SureMed solution that manages insurance company medical requests.

Canterbury District Health Board's adoption of a hybrid cloud infrastructure has enabled it to roll out a number of applications in a hurry during the COVID-19 pandemic, including onboarding a number of new DHBs to the national ICNet infection control expansion program and using technologies such as Microsoft Teams to keep multidisciplinary meetings running remotely.

Canterbury DHB has worked with technology partners Microsoft, CCL and HPE on its cloud infrastructure to support electronic clinical information systems since the devastating earthquakes in 2011. It initially build a private cloud system with CCL before adopting a hybrid approach over the last few years, adding public cloud infrastructure as part of its hybrid cloud strategy.

Victoria's Bendigo Health has rescheduled its long-planned implementation of the TrakCare electronic medical record from InterSystems for the end of next month, having delayed a planned go-live in March in order to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic has seen the regional health service roll out a new remote monitoring system from Siemens Healthineers as well as convert 50 per cent of its outpatients clinics to telehealth, along with the use of thermal imaging technology for temperature testing and the creation of a specific respiratory emergency department set up within a negative pressure environment.

ASX-listed respiratory app developer ResApp Health has signed an agreement with HealthEngine to integrate its appointment booking engine with ResApp’s SleepCheck app.

SleepCheck is a direct-to-consumer smartphone app that uses algorithms to assess a person’s risk of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) by analysing breathing and snoring sounds during sleep.

Practice management software vendor MedicalDirector has added a care planning tool to its MedicalDirector Clinical system, promising to allow GPs to more easily develop care plans for patients with chronic illnesses.

MedicalDirector Care is accessible from within MedicalDirector Clinical, allowing for auto-population of data from the patient's record and promising to reduce the number of steps and potential errors in developing a care plan.

Congratulations Australia. In 2020 in the year of COVID-19, widespread lockdowns, quarantine and MBS-funded telehealth, legalised ePrescriptions have finally arrived. It is a major achievement that should not be underestimated, but there are lingering issues with workflow, safety and privacy that still need to be resolved.

The road to legal ePrescriptions has been long and winding but it has not been a technical or software journey alone. It has required persistent lobbying from the healthcare sector with changes required in legislation at both a federal and jurisdictional level, including changes to the PBS dispensing rules. Governments of all ilks have been risk averse and have consequently been slow to embrace the available solutions.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending October 25: Telemedicine in Africa, contact tracing in Asia, EHRs and the COVID vaccine, India's digital health ID, Excelgate latest, hospital admissions down 10%, voice assist for Cerner, Ireland's digital health labs, virtual health in Dubai

Africa turns to telemedicine to close mental health gap
The Lancet Digital Health ~ Paul Adepoju ~ 21/10/2020

Several countries in Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya, already have a telecommunications density exceeding 100%.

Contact tracing: digital health on the frontline
The Lancet Digital Health ~ Staff writer ~ 21/10/2020

South Korea, China, and Singapore have successfully used digital contact tracing to control the spread of COVID-19, often putting public interest above individuals' right to privacy.

The big news this week in digital health was the expansion of Australia's roll out of electronic prescriptions to metropolitan Sydney, following the fast-track implementation in metropolitan Melbourne and then the rest of Victoria as a weapon in that state's battle against the Covid-19 pandemic.

Also this week we saw some rare movement in the secure messaging arena, with a number of clinical information system vendors and secure messaging services now having successfully completed the implementation of new interoperability standards that will hopefully allow clinicians and healthcare organisations to more easily exchange clinical information electronically.

Research group Precision Driven Health (PDH) has partnered with disability services and support organisation Manawanui and analytics consultancy Nicholson Consulting to conduct new research into the needs of Kiwis receiving Ministry of Health-funded disability services.

The research will combine client data from Manawanui with a range of government datasets, including NZ Census data from Statistics NZ, data from the Household Disability Survey, needs assessment data from the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Social Development job seekers support for sickness and disability, and ACC accident claims data.

Nineteen secure messaging and clinical information system vendors have successfully fulfilled the requirements of the Australian Digital Health Agency's secure messaging industry offer, with practice management system vendors MediRecords and Intrahealth, and patient administration system and billing specialist Direct Control, the latest to complete the work.

The vendors expect to begin rolling out the interoperability capability in the next versions of their software, allowing for enhanced searching across multiple secure messaging services by using a federated provider directory.

However, a number of big names in the industry are not taking part in the offer, including GP practice management system vendors MedicalDirector and Global Health, which also markets the ReferralNet secure messaging service, and market leading secure messaging vendor HealthLink, despite all taking part in two proof-of-concept trials in 2018.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard and Victoria's chief health officer Brett Sutton will make live keynote speeches at the upcoming Digital Health Institute Summit, being held virtually and live in five locations in November.

Ms Gillard, now the chair of mental health support organisation Beyond Blue, will headline the Adelaide event on November 25 with a presentation on access and equity to digital mental health solutions as part of long-term healthcare planning.

Population groups who have experienced discrimination and stigma in healthcare are more likely than the wider community to distrust digital health initiatives and are much less likely to want to share information with health authorities or governments, a new study shows.

A survey of 2000 people from four populations affected by blood-borne viruses (BBVs) and sexually transmissible infections (STIs) found these populations reported the lowest levels of trust in digital technologies and the most frequent experiences of stigma.

They were also far more likely to have opted out of the My Health Record initiative, and were far less likely to be willing to share health data from a device or app with healthcare services.

Metropolitan Sydney will see the next stage in the mass roll-out of electronic prescriptions, with the Australian Digital Health Agency announcing today that it will be the next region to go live with the functionality.

eScripts were originally available only in certain communities of interest before a wider roll out took place in Victoria last month.

Perth's East Metropolitan Health Service has released a request for information on electronic medication management solutions to handle the storage and recording of controlled substances in pharmacy and clinical areas.

The health service is looking for information on the implementation of electronic controlled substances supply units (ESSU) within pharmacy departments in combination with automated dispensing machines (ADMs) to high risk areas.

Healthdirect Australia has integrated its Video Call telehealth service with the Commonwealth's Translating and Interpreting Service (TIS National) and the after hours GP helpline it runs on behalf of the federal Department of Health.

TIS National has a specialty team helping GPs, specialists, nurse practitioners and allied health professionals who require assistance communicating with patients from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds during a clinical consultation.

Online appointment booking service HealthEngine has added extra levels of authentication to its iOS and Android apps, offering passcode protection and the option to set up either Touch ID or Face ID depending on device capabilities.

HealthEngine says the extra authentication steps will support auto-filling of the booking form, saving users time and providing extra security for personal information, including the option to save and access Medicare details.

Pharmacy software vendor Fred IT plans to begin a pilot at the end of this month of new active script list (ASL) functionality that will allow pharmacists to view all of a patient's active scripts and repeats.

Part of the national electronic prescribing program, active script lists are aimed at patients on multiple medications who normally leave their scripts with their regular pharmacy and is an alternative to the new token model of eScripts.

Fred, which developed and operates the eRx prescription exchange service (PES), has worked with competitor MediSecure to develop the technology, which will be made available to other software vendors.

Former Australian Digital Health Agency interim CEO and chief operating officer Bettina McMahon will step up as the new chair of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH) next month.

Ms McMahon has been chosen to succeed inaugural chair Michael Walsh, who has chaired the institute board since its establishment in February 2020 following the merger of the Health Informatics Society of Australia and the Australasian College of Health Informatics.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending October 18: France told to drop US cloud for health data, India's digital health ID, NHS's Excelgate, healthcare consumerism platform, Microsoft Teams takes off, semantic interoperability, US telehealth reimbursement, scanner to ID patients, Cerner's interop tools, blockchain-powered Digital Health Pass

France’s Health Data Hub to move to European cloud infrastructure to avoid EU-US data transfers
TechCrunch ~ Romain Dillet ~ 13/10/2020

Those services should avoid using American cloud hosting companies altogether, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

India hopes digital health ID can get economy moving again
Bloomberg ~ Vrishti Beniwal ~ 14/10/2020

A $23 million program offering a digital health ID to every citizen could bolster India’s economic growth amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to the head of the country’s health authority.

In last week's blog we took a look at a bit of a bungle over in the UK, where the use of an old version of Excel by Public Health England has been blamed for almost 16,000 positive COVID-19 cases being left off the official list for a week, potentially affecting up to 50,000 people.

The head of the National Health Service's Test and Trace program, Dido Harding, is now being asked to consider her position as the ramifications of the bungle continue. The UK is also struggling with wider aspects of Test and Trace, according to Digital Health News, which reports that just 68 per cent of close contacts of those who had tested positive were able to be reached last week.

Twenty-four clinics around Australia are now taking part in a clinical trial of the University of Melbourne's CovidCare app, a self-monitoring app that is aimed at people in isolation who are waiting for test results or have mild symptoms of COVID-19.

Plans are also afoot to apply to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for registration of the app as software as a medical device (SaaMD). There are also plans to use the app to help patients deal with “long COVID” – patients who continue to suffer COVID-related symptoms for weeks and months after infection – and in future with common chronic diseases.

Electronic medical record (EMR) vendor Epic is now using InterSystems' IRIS data platform, which provides database management, interoperability and analytics capabilities.

IRIS is aimed at a number of industries and combines transaction processing and analytics to offer a development platform for building and deploying applications at scale.

InterSystems has also added healthcare-specific capabilities to the platform, including an application framework using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard.

A GP at the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service (VAHS) in Melbourne's Fitzroy has become the first to write a fully conformant electronic prescription in Victoria, using her MMEx system to send the token to the patient's mobile phone.

MMEx has also become one of the first to roll out active ingredient prescribing in its cloud-based system.

MMEx was the first prescribing solution that is conformant with the full version of the electronic prescribing conformance profile to be added to the Australian Digital Health Agency's conformance register. Previous exchanges have involved the fast track version of eScripts, which were rolled out quickly to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

VAHS is an urban Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service that operates a non-PBS in-house dispensary that has special approval to dispense, supply and compound medicines with the goal of providing low cost over the counter items and, in limited circumstances, prescriptions.

Clinical software vendor Software for Specialists (S4S) has become the first to complete its integration with the My Health Record under the Australian Digital Health Agency's (ADHA) industry offer for the specialist medical market.

ADHA opened up the offer in May last year as part of a program to increase use of the My Health Record by specialist doctors in private practice. It involved financial assistance as well as a co-design program for vendors not yet integrated with the My Health Record or to add extra functionality to products that were.

Australian day hospital operator Nexus is working with Auckland-headquartered patient reporting software company Cemplicity to roll out patient reported experience measures (PREMs) technology to enhance the way the hospital group captures and manages patient experiences.

The agreement with Cemplicity will enable Nexus to have a real-time view of patient experiences across the entire organisation, which runs 15 day-only and short stay private hospitals in Australia.

Alfred Health's Victorian Melanoma Service is currently conducting a trial into the effectiveness of artificial intelligence for assessments of skin cancer, directly comparing AI results with those of doctors.

The study is designed to be able to prove if the MoleMap algorithm can be used as a diagnostic aid in a specialist setting prior to conducting a much larger trial of the intervention in primary care.

ASX-listed ResApp Health has partnered with Diabetes Queensland to promote its mobile medical application SleepCheck and raise awareness of sleep apnoea in people living with diabetes.

The direct-to-consumer smartphone app is now available in 36 countries in six different languages, and has recently had features added to save the user’s age, gender and neck size for easier repeat testing.

Healthcare provider Calvary Health Care and health insurer Medibank have been chosen to jointly deliver the South Australian Department of Health's new My Home Hospital program, which is due to commence later this year.

The aim is to increase the number of people receiving acute medical care in their own home or residential aged care, mainly face-to-face but also by virtual care centres.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending October 11: England's Excel COVID tracing bungle, Apple Health Records now available in UK and Canada, app prescribing in Germany, Lyft within Epic, EMRs and machine learning for real-time predictions, NHS's digital transformation during COVID, Zurich buys Aus and S African tech, digital health pass, ransomware attack on clinical trials

Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost
BBC ~ Leo Kelion ~ 06/10/2020

The badly thought-out use of Microsoft's Excel software was the reason nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases went unreported in England.

England has not come out smelling of roses in its dealings with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic and it didn't get much better last week when it was revealed that the use of an old Excel file format meant almost 16,000 positive cases had been left off a list and up to 50,000 close contacts might have been missed.

The rest of the UK is looking a bit better, both in terms of infection rate and death rate, but when the numbers are combined the UK still has the highest rate of deaths in Europe due to some shocking bungling by its government and a silly error like the one discovered by Public Health England (PHE) has not helped much.

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) is warning consumers not to provide personal information to callers claiming to be representatives of the organisation, saying the calls are a scam.

ADHA said in a statement today that it had received reports about fraudulent phone calls from individuals trying to enrol people for a health record.

eHealth NSW has gone to the market for a statewide single digital patient record (SDPR) that will bring together the different instances of NSW Health's electronic medical record (EMR), patient administration (PAS) and laboratory information (LIMS) systems on a single platform, preferably delivered on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis.

Envisioning a six-year process for a statewide roll-out of the system, eHealth NSW also anticipates that a clinical health information exchange (CHIE) platform will need to be built to facilitate integration and interoperability between the various specialist clinical systems in use as well as the EMRs used by non-NSW Health providers such as Northern Beaches Hospital.

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) will develop a national health interoperability plan this financial year along with a business case for its Service Registration Assistant (SRA), which has been undergoing a proof-of-concept trial in northern NSW.

In its planned performance statement in the 2020 federal budget, the Department of Health says the agency will prioritise implementation of the third year of the National Digital Health Strategy.

The Australian government has allocated $18.6 million in addition to the $2.4 billion it has already announced for telehealth in its COVID-19 emergency response to build an interim system to support ongoing telehealth in the future.

It will also fund the introduction of a unique device identification system for implanted medical devices to the tune of $7.7m, along with the development of a medicines unique identification framework.

Former Australian Digital Health Agency CEO Tim Kelsey has been appointed as the new CEO of ASX-listed PKS Holdings, a Sydney-based provider of advanced data services in healthcare.

Formerly known as Pacific Knowledge Systems, PKS owns the RippleDown clinical expert intelligence system and this year bought fellow Australian health technology company Pavilion Health.

Sydney-based obstetric and maternity software developer Meridian Health Informatics has been bought by Canadian software corporation Harris, part of the Constellation Software group, one of North America’s biggest acquirers of software businesses.

Meridian counts NSW Health, Queensland Health, the Tasmanian Department of Health and Mater Health Group as users of its maternity systems. It also has a suite of healthcare software products and an intelligent data management system called IDME, and also works with Justice Health in NSW.

Queensland clinicians are evaluating a new online system that monitors symptoms and cravings to help combat heavy drinking and alcohol use disorders.

The instant assessment and personalised feedback system (iAx) for alcohol use disorder has been developed to facilitate the use of standardised assessment in addiction treatment.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending October 4: India's National Digital Health Mission, CIOs on telehealth apps, big tech eyes up health disparities, Apple Watch to monitor COVID-19 stress, Apple Watch fuelling unwarranted health fears? bundled iPads for nursing homes, family physicians and health IT, NHS's second attempt at COVID-19 tracing app

Privacy concerns as India pushes for digital health ID
Deccan Herald ~ Reuters ~ 22/09/2020

In a speech last month to mark Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the launch of the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), under which unique Health IDs will be created to hold digital health records of individuals.

Telehealth was again in the news this week with a couple of surveys out looking at patient and clinician views on their experiences with telehealth. While one survey of patients found a pretty good reception from patients and the other of clinicians showing similar, there still remain some technical barriers that are likely to dog telehealth take-up in primary care, specifically video-based telehealth, for the foreseeable future.

There was some criticism of the value of both of these surveys in the comments, and we particularly liked one reader's description of “cyber utopian views” of telehealth that ignore the real problems faced by patients in regional areas and older patients. Her practice uses video conferencing as a last resort, Shona Gallagher says, listing a number of real-world examples of why. Victorian GP Andrew Baird is a student of all things telehealth, and he is keen to hear of other people's experiences with video consultations. We'd like to know more as well, especially if you too have experienced telehealth at Bunnings.

GPs and pharmacists can continue to exchange a digital image of a prescription until next year after the Department of Health extended its special arrangement.

The relaxation of normal rules was introduced in late March as part of the range of temporary measures for telehealth and medications home delivery to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

St John of God Midland Public Hospital in Perth has officially launched a pilot program that allows clinicians to “prescribe” an information pack specifically tailored for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples and send it to them directly from the hospital's electronic medical record.

The project involves Healthily’s GoShare digital platform and has supported over 1000 patients so far. Tailored information packs are sent from St John of God Midland's Telstra Health EMR.

Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) has gone live with the pre-admission testing (PAT) module of its iPro Anaesthesia system, meaning a full perioperative information management system has rolled out at South Australia's largest hospital.

The iPro PAT module allows anaesthetists to undertake a pre-assessment of a patient prior to surgery so that risks are identified and catered for. The module promises to lead to a reduction in case cancellations and delays.

Medication management and pharmacy solution vendor Omnicell has launched a cloud-based dosage administration aid (DAA) solution that is integrated with the leading pharmacy dispense solutions along with a number of aged care clinical systems.

SureMed X provides what Omnicell calls a closed loop workflow using one system to provide checks and balances at every stage of DAA packing.

A sample of almost 600 patients who have received a telehealth consultation either by phone or video have rated the experience well, with 62 per cent saying their telehealth experience was “just as good” or “better” than a traditional in-person medical appointment.

Another survey of more than 1300 doctors found they too rated the experience well, with 87 per cent saying they were interested in continuing to use telehealth if there was ongoing MBS funding.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has launched a website that will provide up-to-date data on suicide, self-harm and suicidal behaviour as part of the National Suicide and Self-harm Monitoring System.

It will use data from the new National Ambulance Surveillance System (NASS), which has been established to provide timely and comprehensive data on mental health and intentional self-harm sourced from paramedic electronic patient care records (ePCR) provided by state and territory-based ambulance services.

Queensland Health has been encouraged to redesign its project governance frameworks to ensure accountability for project delivery following a budget overrun and several glitches with its new enterprise resource planning system for finance and supply chain management.

Queensland Auditor-General Brendan Worrall said project governance would be an important consideration when Queensland Health restarted the replacement project for its $210 million HBCIS patient administration system, a tender for which was terminated in January 2019 over conflict of interest allegations.

Vitro Software has added advanced voice recognition capabilities to its digital medical record (DMR), allowing clinicians to navigate through the system and document encounters using voice commands.

Dubbed Vitro Voice, the new functionality includes voice control, speech to text and notes templating, allowing clinicians to open a patient's record, fully document patient interactions using pre-configured templates and then saving and closing the record all by voice commands.

The Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH) has developed a new pathway for digital health executives to become fellows of the institute.

Fellowship recognises outstanding professional accomplishment in digital health and health informatics.

The legislation underpinning Australia's My Health Record system is being reviewed and interested parties are being given the opportunity to have their say on how the legislation can be improved through a month-long consultation process.

Former Commonwealth Ombudsman and Australian Information Commissioner John McMillan is leading the review and is due to deliver a final report to the Minister for Health by December 1, 2020.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending September 27: FDA's centre of digital health excellence, €3b for German EHRs, £35 for NHS contact tracing apps, COVID-19 case rates on Google Maps, information blocking, five-year sentence for Dark Overlord hacker, UK GPs provide data on COVID-19 through EMIS, Babylon escapes data breach punishment

FDA establishes Digital Health Center of Excellence
MobiHealthNews ~ Dave Muoio ~ 22/09/2020

The center is intended to help the agency reimagine digital health oversight, advance best practices within the industry, provide technological advice when needed and generally serve as the quarterback for digital health-focused initiatives within the agency.

The New Zealand Ministry of Health released its roadmap towards interoperability recently with little fanfare, but we think they should have made a bit more of a big deal about it as the plan is pretty good overall.

Refreshingly free of jargon, the document sets out what the current state of play is, what the future state should be, how the health sector will get there and what is probably achievable in five years. The ministry's Health Information Standards Organisation (HISO) calls it a “living document” which will be regularly updated and reports on progress made quarterly.

Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) has gone live with a unified communications (UC) project involving secure messaging functionality embedded within its Epic electronic medical record, which can be accessed through the same native app on mobile devices that is used to access patient medical records.

In a first, RCH has also built a dynamic staff directory as a bespoke addition to the project, allowing clinicians to select the appropriate person or group of clinicians to send instant secure messages to, based on their role and availability.

RCH consultant paediatrician and clinical informatician Daryl Cheng said Epic was one of few EMRs as far as he was aware where the medical record came in a native app format as opposed to a mobile website.

The Australian Digital Health Agency says electronic prescriptions will be made available to the rest of Victoria following significant uptake in greater Melbourne since the capability was released in August.

ADHA says more than 34,000 electronic prescriptions have been received by patients in Melbourne from around 1000 prescribers and 600 community pharmacies.

More than 100,000 eScripts have been written nationally since May, ADHA says.

Microsoft will make its new Cloud for Healthcare platform generally available next month, its first industry-specific cloud offering that incorporates its Azure FHIR service and FHIR converter along with a new Azure IoT connector for FHIR and a medical imaging server for DICOM.

It will also feature expanded Microsoft Teams capabilities with a Microsoft Teams EHR connector that will allow clinicians and patients to launch Teams virtual visits from within electronic medical records, the first of which will be within Epic's patient and provider portals.

Western Victoria Primary Health Network (WVPHN) is funding a new program using the My Emergency Doctor tele-emergency service to improve telehealth services at 12 residential aged care facilities in the region.

Western Victoria PHN has also funded a trial of the service at Great Ocean Road Health's Lorne and Apollo Bay urgent care centres (UCCs).

The Wellington Sexual Health service is running a NZ-first trial of the SXT Health service platform for quick contact tracing to help reduce the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

The anonymised SXT service allows people diagnosed with an STI to inform their sexual contacts of an STI risk via text message or email.

New Zealand's Health Information Standards Organisation (HISO) has set out a detailed roadmap to take the health and disability system towards interoperability, publishing a living document that it plans to update annually with quarterly reports.

The roadmap solidifies HL7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification as the main standard underpinning an API-based architecture, with the previously favoured openEHR framework no longer being considered for HISO standards.

The federal government will continue to provide free access to the Healthdirect video conferencing system for GPs as well as subsidising the cost of SMS messages for electronic prescriptions under the $2 billion package to extend a range of COVID-19 health measures announced last week.

And while it is still considering extending the special arrangement allowing for image-based prescriptions to be sent by fax or email, the Australian Digital Health Agency has announced it will extend the end-date for conformant eScript software beyond September 30.

Anglicare Sydney says there is no evidence that personal data was stolen despite having identified that a 17-gigabyte data transmission to a remote location took place following the ransomware attack that affected some of its systems on August 31.

The aged care provider has also clarified that the attack only affected Anglicare Sydney and no other Anglicare agency across Australia, refuting a claim in a Sydney newspaper that the breach could have affected the agency's out of home care program for foster children.

Medical billing API specialist Claiming.com.au has become one of the first to integrate with Medicare's new web services interface, and is offering its API as a business to business service to other software vendors developing medical claiming capabilities or wanting assistance to transition their existing integrations to web services.

Medicare has been using a client adapter-based system running on Java since the 1990s but has been modernising its online claiming systems using web services and will shut down the client adapter in March 2022.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending September 20: Patient dies after ransomware attack, GOSH gets HIMSS Stage 7, Singapore's Apple Watch health deal, patient want their health data, US telehealth expansion, tech for Scottish care homes, Wales data leak, FDA approval for Fitbit's ECG app, Kaiser Permanente's virtual first insurance plan, vulnerabilities in patient monitoring software

German hospital hacked, patient taken to another city dies
AP ~ Staff writer ~ 17/09/2020

German authorities said Thursday that an apparently misdirected ransomware attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.

After months of agitation from the doctors' groups and tight lips from the Department of Health, the federal government finally came to the party and announced late on Thursday night that it would extend Medicare-funded telehealth for another six months.

The doctors' groups are still lobbying for the new MBS item numbers to be made permanent, but for the time being they will no longer expire on September 30 but carry through until March 31, 2021. The GP-led respiratory clinics and home medicines delivery will also continue for another six months, although it appears that the subsidy for COVID-related SMSs might expire as scheduled.

The federal government has agreed to extend the temporary MBS item numbers for telehealth introduced in March to combat the coronavirus pandemic for another six months.

While bulk-billing will still be available it will be voluntary, with medical and allied health practices able to apply their regular fees. Subsidised home delivery of medicines will also continue.

ASX-listed medications adherence app vendor MedAdvisor has launched new electronic prescription functionality in its app, with a roll-out ready to start in Victoria followed by the rest of the country.

The new functionality will allow eScript tokens to be tapped into MedAdvisor and automatically organised into a digital script wallet, which can be sent straight to a pharmacy’s dispensing workflow.

Healthcare professionals will be able to record advance care planning (ACP) progress notes within the South Island's HealthOne and Health Connect South clinical information systems to allow them to document ACP conversations with patients and share them electronically.

The ACP progress note is an improved version of the electronic progress notes that have been used by Canterbury District Health Board for some years.

Medical software vendors and health funds were left scrambling over the weekend as the Department of Health hurried through changes to the Medicare Benefits Schedule for cardiac imaging services, with one vendor complaining they were only given one day's notice before the update came into effect on September 15.

The changes to 10 item numbers for stress echocardiography and continuous electrocardiogram recording were legislated on September 10 and a data file added to MBS Online on September 12 for downloading into medical software.

Health informatics and analytics firm Pulse Infoframe has launched a COVID-19 pandemic mental health assessment platform in Australia, aimed at assisting consumers to manage their mental health and monitor the short-term and long-term effects of the pandemic.

The free tool is based on Pulse Infoframe's patient reported outcome measures (PROM) platform and is available on any computer, tablet or smartphone with an internet connection. It involves a Stress Monitor questionnaire that surveys how the person is feeling and dealing with COVID-19. If the person is very concerned or anxious, they are encouraged to participate in the healthie VOX mental health assessment.

Apple has added to the health capabilities of its Watch models with a new feature that measures the user's blood oxygen saturation and is linked to its Health app to allow users to track trends over time.

While Apple says measurements taken with the Blood Oxygen app are not intended for medical use and are only designed for general fitness purposes, the company is working on three new research studies using the Watch to explore how blood oxygen levels can be used in future health applications.

The public health laboratories that are part of the Communicable Disease Genomics Network (CDGN) have partnered with US genomic sequencing system vendor Illumina to set up a national COVID-19 tracking system.

The laboratories – including the Peter Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Westmead Hospital, UNSW at the Prince of Wales Hospital and Queensland Health Forensic and Scientific Services – aim to sequence the virus genomes of all positive COVID-19 tests in Australia and track COVID-19 using genomics on a national scale, rather than state by state.

The CDGN will use Illumina's next-generation genomic sequencing technology, which is due to be delivered next week to expand existing capacity.

The directors of ASX-listed Citadel Group are supporting a bid from private equity firm Pacific Equity Partners (PEP) to buy out the company for $503.1 million.

Citadel Group's healthcare division Citadel Health markets the Evolution laboratory information system, previously known as Auslab, along with the Charm oncology solution.

Citadel recently received an extension to its decades-long contract with Queensland Health for Auslab following the cancellation of the $64 million laboratory information system replacement project with Sunquest. It is also used by NSW Health Pathology and several large health services in Victoria.

The NSW and ACT governments have launched new check-in apps for businesses and venues that are required to capture customer contact details under public health orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

ACT Health has developed a free Check In CBR app that allows customers at participating venues to check in and provide their details for contact tracing by scanning a QR code upon arrival or entering a six-digit code.

The contact information of app users is automatically sent to ACT Health, for use by contact tracers if required and to assist in identifying anyone who may have been exposed to COVID-19 in the ACT.

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) has released a strategy document outlining a roadmap over the next seven years and beyond for the workforce and education changes required to support the adoption of digital health.

The National Digital Health Workforce and Education Roadmap uses a horizon-based framework to explore the changes that will be required, looking at short and medium-term goals.

It will be accompanied by a capability action plan (CAP) that is set to begin development in the 2020-21 financial year and which will provide specific targets and a detailed cost analysis.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT news for the week ending September 13: AI boosterism, Italian telehealth post-pandemic, China's digital health start-ups, telehealth and quality of care, Thai ransomware attack, TraceTogether in Singapore, NHS app lessons, AI beyond the buzz, Withings' medical ScanWatch, reducing clicks in Cerner, Abu Dhabi HIE platform, Palantir's NHS data store

Whistleblowers charge CEO of NJ firm with inflating AI capability
MedCity News ~ Arundhati Parmar ~ 07/09/2020

They allege that ElectrifAi is touting an improperly-developed healthcare AI tool amidst a pandemic and accuses the CEO of racism, a charge that finds corroboration in an employment lawsuit.

The post COVID Italian telehealth experience
MobiHealthNews ~ Tammy Lovell ~ 04/09/2020

However, a major barrier was that telemedicine had not been formally recognised in Italy. Certified platforms were expensive and not immediately available, and a clear procedure was needed to write and deliver clinical records to patients.

A couple of very interesting blogs caught our eye this week, both written by experts in their field that raise new possibilities and go against the orthodoxy. One of those was an op-ed by epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald that poured a lot of cold water on the hysterical reaction to news that contact tracers by and large use whiteboards, pen and paper in what is still very much a manual process.

Victoria is belatedly investing in a common IT solution that is sure to assist this process somewhat but it's not going to solve all problems. People will still need to be interviewed and maps of their movements still need to be made, unless we go down the track of more authoritarian regimes and mandate that the population wears a trackable device. Considering the squawks of horror from the privacy lobby that met the announcement of the nondescript COVIDSafe app, we can't see this happening.

Data collected by Outcome Health's POLAR research team shows there has been a marked reduction in GP presentations for childhood infective illnesses such as bronchiolitis and gastroenteritis during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a decrease in antibiotic prescriptions, but this has been accompanied by worrying increases in anxiety, depression and eating disorder-related diagnoses.

The data has been collected using Outcome Health's POLAR GP tool from 1000 general practices in South Eastern Melbourne, Eastern Melbourne, Gippsland, South Western Sydney and Central and Eastern Sydney PHNs and analysed as part of the organisation's ongoing data insights research program.