The third quarter of 2017 kicked off with a super story from The Guardian's Paul Farrell, who revealed that he'd been able to buy his own Medicare number from a dodgy purveyor on the dark web. The yarn immediately spurred allegations that it would give other dodgy types access to the My Health Record, which it didn't, but it quickly became apparent that there was a breach of the Department of Human Services' systems somewhere along the line. The finger was then pointed at HPOS, which allows healthcare providers to search for patients' Medicare numbers.

The AMA told a subsequent quick-fire inquiry that while it wasn't downplaying the seriousness of the breach, it was warning against lumbering general practices with extra responsibility for security and recommended that DHS instead speed up the move to the Provider Digital Access (PRODA) system for authentication. This is exactly what the inquiry did, recommending an expeditious move from the current PKI certificates to PRODA. Meanwhile, the Australian Federal Police is still investigating.

The 855-bed Liverpool Hospital in south western Sydney has gone live with the enhanced version of the Cerner electronic medical record, known in NSW as eMR2.

NSW has now gone live with eMR2 at 154 of the 178 sites due to implement the system, including some of the state's largest hospitals such as Westmead.

It was a big year for the FHIR standard as release three was launched and localisation was well underway in Australia and New Zealand. While it was created by an Australian and the Europeans have adopted it with alacrity, FHIR is in large part being driven in the US, home of the big EMR vendors Cerner, Epic and Meditech and other partners in the Argonaut Project. Cerner is bringing a SMART-on-FHIR EHR extension interface to Australia next year and an Australian version of the Argonaut project is also on the cards under the management of HL7 Australia. We'll have more on that in the new year.

In My Health Record news, NSW Health began sending pathology reports to the national system from some of its public hospitals. Pioneered by the labs formerly known as the South Eastern Area Laboratory Service (SEALS), NSW Health Pathology is using the HealtheNet portal to upload the reports rather than directly from the laboratory information system.

Brisbane MP Steven Miles has been named as Queensland's new Minister for Health, taking over from Cameron Dick, who has been promoted to Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk's five-person economic and trade team as Minister for State Development, Infrastructure and Planning.

The team also includes new Treasurer Jackie Trad and former education minister Kate Jones as the new Minister for Innovation.

2017 turned out to be an exemplar in the bigwigs resigning over travel expenses (and assorted unexplained circumstances) stakes and the first one was the biggest. It all kicked off early in January when Sussan Ley stood aside – and the following week stood down – as Australia's health minister. We couldn't find any record of a particular health crisis on the Gold Coast that would necessitate her travelling there 20 times in three years but she kept popping in for some reason and it seems she liked it so much she decided to invest in a nice little $795,000 beach shack.

Ms Ley had been busy shepherding the federal government through the difficult terrain of health policy reform after the Coalition's near-miss at the 2016 election but it eventually fell to Greg Hunt to pretty much reverse many of the government's unpopular and to be honest ill-judged ideas, such as the plan to outsource the Medicare payments system. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had to guarantee that this would be kept in public hands after the issue almost cost him government, with the Department of Health holding market briefings in early January and going to tender in March.

Telstra's new business group executive and chair of its Telstra Health arm Cynthia Whelan is leaving the company, the Australian Financial Review reports.

Ms Whelan joined Telstra in 2013 and was named as chair of the board of Foxtel this year. She acted as managing director of Telstra Health following the retirement of inaugural MD Shane Solomon in 2016 as the company looked for a permanent replacement.

Victoria's Barwon Health will roll out Cerner's FirstNet at University Hospital Geelong's emergency department to replace its Symphony system, which is no longer supported by vendor EMIS Health.

FirstNet will be used to manage patient data across multiple hospital wards and will be integrated with other clinical information systems used across the organisation, including its digital medical record.

Best Practice Software has launched the latest release of its clinical and practice management software solution Bp Premier, featuring changes to the support the National Cervical Cancer Screening Program and the uploading of pathology and radiology reports to the My Health Record.

Bp Premier Lava service pack 3 (SP3) also includes some extra enhancements, including support for the Health Care Homes trial allowing participating sites to record and report on patient tiers.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending December 10:

Four hospitals piloting OurNotes initiative in 2018
Healthcare Informatics ~ Heather Landl ~ 07/12/2017

Beginning in January, four academic hospitals – Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, University of Washington in Seattle, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire and University of Colorado in Boulder – will begin piloting a new digital tool called OurNotes that enables patients to contribute to their clinical notes.

Allscripts CEO Paul Black claims the EHR vendor will pull ahead of the pack in 2018
Healthcare IT News ~ Mike Miliard ~ 07/12/2017

After just hitting an interoperability milestone, and fresh off the acquisition of former rival McKesson’s health IT business, its chief executive says the vendor plans to capitalize on its larger size and scale.

Health Minister Greg Hunt had the conspiracy theorists in a bit of a tizz last week when he lodged a little piece of paper authorising that the opt-out model for the My Health Record begin some time next year. Everyone thought he'd already done this but it turns out it is a three-step process, with the actual date for the three-month opt-out period yet to be announced but most likely to begin in mid-2018.

That didn't stop the tinfoil hatters, though, who insisted that the three months actually began on the date he lodged the rule, namely last Thursday, and that the government was tricking us all into getting a MyHR without our knowledge. The horrors that lie within the MyHR are such that only by conning us will the government get anyone on board, they reckon.

Adelaide-based clinical decision support software specialist Alcidion has agreed to buy New Zealand clinical messaging firm Oncall Systems, which makes the Smartpage clinical communications suite used at North Shore Hospital in Auckland and Wellington Hospital.

Alcidion has been a reseller for Oncall in Australia since May and has integrated Smartpage with its Miya patient flow and bed management modules. Alcidion recently won a three-year contract with Monash Health to implement Miya Smartpage as an out of hours clinical task management solution across its six hospitals.

Precedence Health Care has rolled out the risk stratification tool it has developed under contract to the Department of Health to the general practices and Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services taking part in the Health Care Homes initiative.

The tool, which can also be configured for practices not involved in the trial, was rolled out to the first 20-odd practices taking part in the two-year trial in October, with the remaining 180 going live on December 1.

The roll out of the GP Access to The Viewer (GPTV) portal, which allows authorised GPs to access patient information held in Queensland public hospital systems in real time, has been described as a “game-changer” by users.

GPTV first went live on June 28 and by September, over a thousand GPs had registered to use it. It gives GPs real-time access to The Viewer, Queensland Health's clinical portal that is integrated with the state's electronic medical record (ieMR) and provides aggregated data such as pathology results, medications and diagnostic imaging reports and patients' My Health Records.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) is hoping to kick off a new project looking at the development of a minimum set of requirements for general practice software.

RACGP eHealth and practice systems expert committee chair Nathan Pinskier told the college's eHealth forum in Melbourne recently that the development of a minimum set of standards was something that members had been calling for.

Well-known health services academic Trish Greenhalgh is heading up the speakers' list for the Australian Telehealth Conference next April, joining Stanford Medicine X CEO Larry Chu and the University of Canberra's Deborah Lupton at the Sydney event.

ATC 2018 will take a slightly different approach than in the past, with a concentration on social developments in medicine, co-design and design innovation along with more traditional views on telehealth being used in practice.

eHealth NSW has received a clean bill of health from the NSW Auditor-General, with major IT projects being completed on time and on budget and the nine large projects currently underway all on track for completion in the expected timeframe.

In his report on the financial and service delivery audits of NSW Health entities released today, acting auditor-general Ian Goodwin found that overall, NSW Health is achieving most of its targets.

Victoria's Goulburn Valley Health (GVH) has gone to tender for a medical oncology software solution to assist with the management of patient flow, bookings, clinical documentation, medication management, diagnostic investigations and provider workload management.

GVH runs a 266-bed hospital at Shepparton along with a range of hospital and community services in the Hume region as well as the Peter Copulos Cancer and Wellness Centre (PCCWC).

New Zealand's director-general of health Chai Chuah is stepping down from the role after less than three years into his five-year term.

Mr Chuah, who oversaw a controversial restructure of the Ministry of Health that included the removal of the National Health IT Board and its long-term director Graeme Osborne in 2016, spent two years as acting director-general before his official appointment in 2015.

The Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA) has published a matrix setting out the capabilities of six shared care planning tools that general practices and primary health networks (PHNs) can use for the Health Care Homes project, which kicked off in earnest last week.

The matrix, developed in association with the Department of Health, has been a bone of contention since a similar table, which also included comparative rankings of products and pricing information, was published on the Health Care Homes wiki page some months ago.

The official rule applying the opt-out model for the My Health Record on a national scale has been made by Health Minister Greg Hunt, with the exact date to be announced next year.

The power to move the system to opt out was given through the PCEHR amendment bill in 2015, which amended the My Health Records Act 2012 to move the system from an opt-in model.

NSW Health has integrated its HealtheNet clinical portal with the iPharmacy dispensing software used in many NSW hospitals and is now uploading discharge medication information to the My Health Record from selected facilities.

HealtheNet also provides NSW Health clinicians with access to hospital medical imaging results and pathology results, and is the vehicle NSW Health is using to deliver hospital pathology reports to the My Health Record.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending December 3:

Ping An’s Good Doctor app targeting US$1 billion share sale
South China Morning Post ~ Peggy Sito ~ 27/11/2017

Ping An Good Doctor, the largest online health care and medical platform in China by users, plans to list on the Hong Kong stock exchange in the first half of next year, aiming to raise about US$1 billion.

Stanford kicks off Apple Heart Study to screen and virtually triage patients with irregular heartbeats
FierceHealthcare ~ Evan Sweeney ~ 30/11/2017

Stanford Medicine and Apple have officially kicked off a research initiative test looking into how the Apple Watch can identify users experiencing irregular heart rhythms and virtually connect them with a physician.

The flurry of activity in the primary healthcare sector continued to dominate the news this week, with the big guns in the private pathology sector all now signing on to connect to the My Health Record, patient education getting a run and patient portals also in the news.

But while our most popular story for the week was the news that Primary and ACL are joining Sonic in working towards uploading private pathology reports to the national system, there was also news about other big public initiatives kicking off, including the cervical cancer screening program renewal and the second tranche of practices going live as Health Care Homes.

New Zealand's State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes has formally asked the Auditor-General's office to conduct an inquiry into the procurement of the HealthTap virtual health platform, which has cost the board $NZ14.6 million over two years but never went out to a formal tender.

HealthTap is the technology underpinning Waikato's SmartHealth project, which currently has 9000 patients and 2500 clinicians registered and is being used for about 200 consultations a month. Originally called Virtual DHB, the project allows patients to directly text or video conference with specialists using a tablet or mobile phone.

According to an Audit NZ review of the HealthTap procurement process, released today by the DHB as the fallout over the resignations of CEO Nigel Murray and board chairman Bob Simcock over an expenses scandal continues, the DHB had looked at available New Zealand solutions when considering a trial in 2015 but was less than satisfied, having had a “recent experience of a failed system”.

The Australian Digital Health Agency is holding a connectathon next week for its secure messaging technical working group, which is working on plans to test a federated directory search capability using a FHIR application programming interface.

ADHA secure messaging program manager Sari McKinnon told the RACGP eHealth forum in Melbourne last week that the working group was planning to develop a seamless way to look for healthcare provider information across a range of different vendor directories using a FHIR API, with good progress made so far.

ADHA is sponsoring two proof-of-concept trials for multi-vendor secure messaging, one led by Telstra Health and one by HealthLink, testing the safe transmission of messages between secure messaging services, clinical software systems and different provider organisations.

NZ's Ministry of Health has received a positive report card for its efforts to help the primary care sector roll out patient portals, but it should start collecting statistical information on their benefits to encourage wider use, the Auditor-General says.

Patient portals have been available in New Zealand since 2008 but a concerted effort was undertaken to encourage uptake in 2014, resulting in 50 per cent of all general practices now offering one to patients.

However, only nine per cent of patients are registered to use a portal, below the 25 per cent global benchmark and the 40 per cent the ministry thinks it needs to achieve for their full benefits to be realised.

Queensland Health has signed an agreement with the United Nations to allow its early warning and response clinical observation charts to be used in UN-operated facilities globally.

The Queensland Adult Deterioration Detection System (Q-ADDS) and the Children’s Early Warning and Response System Tool (CEWT) are used throughout Queensland and are being rolled out electronically in the state's integrated electronic medical record (ieMR).

GP desktop software vendors are reminding doctors to select the new Cervical Screening test option in their clinical systems rather than the old Pap test, as patients may be charged for the latter when the renewal of the cervical cancer screening program kicks off on Friday.

All vendors are releasing program or data updates that will see the terminology changed in pathology request screens, with new MBS item numbers also added, and Best Practice Software is also gearing up to release Bp Premier service pack three (SP3) next month, which will also include changes to the pathology and imaging request process so patients can opt out of having their test reports automatically uploaded to the My Health Record.

The Black Dog Institute has received $2.18 million in funding to run a trial involving 20,000 teenagers to see whether mental health apps can prevent depression in adolescents.

Dubbed the ‘Future Proofing’ trial, it will test whether mental health apps can effectively ‘inoculate’ Year 7 students from developing depression after 12 months.

Pathology providers Primary Health Care and Australian Clinical Labs (ACL, formerly Healthscope Pathology) have joined Sonic Healthcare in agreeing to connect to the My Health Record, meaning all three dominant players in public and private pathology are likely to be uploading reports to the system next year.

Another seven software vendors and labs have also signed on with the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) following a private sector market offer earlier this year. This includes Queensland-headquartered InfinityPath, direct to consumer provider MyHealthTest, the Garvan Institute's private clinical genomics service Genome.One and the Victorian Cytology Service.

All healthcare professionals in western Sydney will have access to the GoShare patient education platform as a phased roll-out begins this month under an agreement signed between GoShare developer Healthily, the Western Sydney PHN (WentWest) and the Western Sydney Local Health District.

GoShare enables healthcare professionals to send information and resources relevant to a patient's condition to them to encourage self-management behaviour. The content is sent in a variety of formats such as patient narratives, video, animation, text and apps that can be tailored to the patient and their condition.

Waikato District Health Board has teamed up with US firm CHESS Mobile Health to customise its addiction relapse prevention app to provide extra support to people recovering from alcohol or other drug issues.

Originally called ACHESS (Addiction Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System) and designed by the University of Wisconsin, the app has been customised for the New Zealand system and renamed Recovery in Hand powered by ACHESS.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending November 26:

Amazon working with Cerner on pop health cloud platform
Healthcare IT News ~ Jessica Davis ~ 22/11/2017

AWS will be working with the healthcare tech giant on its HealtheIntent platform to analyze clinical data and predict available treatment.

More than a quarter of acute NHS trusts fail to undertake cyber penetrative tests
Digital Health News ~ Owen Hughes ~ 22/11/2017

Digital Health Intelligence reveals more action is needed to prepare for the next cyber attack, with only a few trusts carrying out penetration testing to check their resilience against security threats.

Primary care was back in the news this week, highlighted by yesterday's announcement that Fred IT had won the tender to build Victoria's new real-time prescription monitoring system, with ReferralNet and Argus scoring a few runs on secure messaging, a new survey out looking at the digital general practice, and a whole gang of diagnostic imaging software vendors signing up for the My Health Record.

The survey, carried out by online booking, recall and reminder service HotDoc, had a number of very interesting nuggets – not the least of which is that yes, sometimes your patients will pay to not have to come in to see you – but also the finding that most people use online booking systems not for their own convenience but so they can book their personal doctor more conveniently. A good proportion are also willing to follow their doctor when they change practices, which just reiterates what everyone has been banging on about for years now about how the relationship between doctor and patient is a special one.

Melbourne-based Fred IT has won the bid to build Victoria's $29.5 million SafeScript real time prescription monitoring system and will use its existing eRx prescription exchange technology and work with rival MediSecure to obtain prescription data.

Fred, which is half-owned by the Pharmacy Guild and half by Telstra Health, will roll out the system next year. It will be mandatory for doctors, pharmacists and nurse practitioners to use under legislation passed earlier this year.

Victoria has decided to build its own system following the stalled roll-out of the national Electronic Recording and Reporting of Controlled Drugs (ERRCD) system, and has also chosen to monitor Schedule 4 drugs of addiction such as benzodiazepines, Z class sleeping pills and codeine, which is being upscheduled in February, as well as S8 opioids.

Discount pharmacy giant Chemist Warehouse and dispense system vendor Corum are both set to connect to the My Health Record system in the new year, meaning all community pharmacy software vendors have now signed on to the Australian Digital Health Agency's community pharmacy software industry partnership.

Chemist Warehouse, which currently uses Corum's LOTS dispensing system but is understood to be considering its options, has about 300 retail stores around the country. Corum, which along with Fred IT and Minfos dominates the community pharmacy software market, has about 1000 customers for its suite of products and is currently building a a new cloud-based system.

Sixteen vendors offering diagnostic imaging software have signed service agreements with the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) to connect to the My Health Record, including major players Agfa, Carestream, Intellirad, Telstra Health's Medinexus and publicly listed Pro Medicus.

The agency says the vendors will begin building connectivity into their systems over the next few months and by the end of 2018, private radiology practices will be able to upload diagnostic imaging reports to their patients' My Health Record.

Northern Irish laboratory information system (LIS) vendor Cirdan has won a contract to provide its Ultra system for Victoria's Northern Health, which plans to bring its pathology service back in-house after some years of outsourcing to Healthscope.

Cirdan acquired the Ultra system, which was originally developed in Australia in the 1980s by Triple G, from GE Healthcare in 2013 when it bought GE's Centricity lab division.

General practices participating in the Health Care Homes trials have been given over a year to begin using compliant care planning software, despite shared care planning being a core element of the model and the trials themselves only scheduled to last two years.

Software vendors who self-attest that their products are compliant with minimum standards have also been given a whole year to connect to the My Health Record, despite it also being a core element of the trial and mandatory for participating practices to use.

Pulse+IT has also confirmed that a comparative table, independently developed by the South Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Network (SEM PHN) to compare and rate the different shared care planning tools available on the market, was removed from the Health Care Homes wiki following a complaint by the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA) and another matrix, which does not include ratings or important elements such as cost, put in its place.

The ability to book an appointment with their usual GP is the main reason patients choose to book online, even over the convenience of appointment time and location, a new survey looking at patient engagement and digital tools has found.

The survey also found that nine out of 10 patients would prefer to order repeat prescriptions online rather than having to visit their GP in person, and more than half would be prepared to pay $20 for the privilege of doing so.

Melbourne-based IP Health named former RMIT Publishing director Chris De Sair as its chief business development officer (CBDO), in charge of finance, sales and service, marketing and administration.

IP Health markets the Verdi clinical viewer and integration platform that has been used at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne and at Brisbane's Mater Health for a number of years. The suite includes the V-Chart, V-Referral, V-Notes, V-Scan, V-Mobile and V-Photo applications.

Secure messaging vendors Global Health and Telstra Health have achieved a major breakthrough in health information interoperability, successfully exchanging encrypted clinical messages through their ReferralNet and Argus platforms to a number of different clinical software products and from different public and private sector organisations.

The two companies have been working together on making their systems interoperable for some time, achieving one-way interoperability from ReferralNet to Argus subscribers in October last year, and field testing messages sent from Argus to ReferralNet subscribers from in August.

The achievement is also a triumph for Victoria, involving the support of the Western Victoria PHN, Peninsula Health, Melbourne GP and former AMA president Mukesh Haikerwal, whose practice has been heavily involved in the trials, and RACGP eHealth committee chairman Nathan Pinskier.

Publicly listed health technology vendor Jayex says it is confident it can continue operations despite concerns over its negative cash flow and the need for another top-up loan from chairman and major shareholder Michael Boyd.

Jayex, which markets a range of self check-in kiosks, patient flow management and appointment booking technologies in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, reported negative cash flows in its most recent quarterly report and was asked for an explanation by the ASX.

New Zealand's primary care networks have got together to explore the potential of developing a national primary care data service (NPCDS) to help improve population health, quality improvement and health system planning.

The PCNs, also known as primary health organisations (PHOs), have issued a request for expressions of interest for a vendor or vendor consortia to develop and operate the service, which they expect would either comprise a centralised enterprise data warehouse approach or a health information exchange model using an API.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending November 19:

Store keeps receiving faxed health records
Canadian Healthcare Technology ~ Staff writer ~ 15/11/2017

Saskatchewan’s privacy commissioner wants the Saskatoon Health Region to ensure its employees follow the rules when it comes to faxing personal health information after a patient’s test results were sent to a computer store – for the second time.

Top 10 predictions for healthcare IT in 2018
Health Data Management ~ Staff writer ~ 15/11/2017

As new technology increasingly is adopted by healthcare organizations, a variety of new drivers are emerging that will affect how IT is used to enable better care.

The Australian Digital Health Agency released its first annual report this week and gave itself a nice pat on the back for a few milestones reached. The agency, which likes to style itself as the Agency with a capital A and which we like to imagine is modelled after a certain bureau (of investigation) with a capital B, laid out its strategic priorities and how it reckons it measured up.

Turns out it reckons it did OK, fulfilling a number of strategic priorities such as setting up the secure messaging trials, writing the national digital health strategy, and increasing the number of people and organisations registered for the My Health Record. While the agency has been set up to handle a few different things, progress with the MyHR is of course the biggie, so we were keen to see what it had to report.

It's almost a year since the full roll-out of a cloud-based app to the 800 or so nurses working for child health organisation Plunket, and the real-time data now being gathered is allowing the organisation to specifically target areas such as immunisation and breastfeeding rates.

The charitable NGO first piloted its electronic Plunket health record (ePHR) in 2015 and by December 2016, had completed the roll-out to all of its nurses and health workers, who access it on a Windows tablet to do a range of health screens such as Well Child Tamariki Ora health checks.

EMR vendor Allscripts is set to roll out its cloud-based, mobile anaesthesia information management system at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital to provide a complete and continuous patient record anywhere anaesthesia care is provided.

Allscripts, which provides the technology behind the Electronic Patient Administration System (EPAS) being implemented in South Australia's major hospitals, partners with fellow US firm iProcedures to deliver the anaesthesia information management system (AIMS), which is integrated with Allscripts's Sunrise clinical suite.

Sydney firm Innovative Clinical Information Management Systems (iCIMS) has expanded the roll-out of the oncology multi-disciplinary team meetings (MDM) solution used by the shared breast cancer service at the Royal Melbourne and the Royal Women’s hospitals to fellow Parkville precinct resident, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.

It has also gone live with the solution at the St George Hospital breast cancer service in Sydney, expanding on the existing iCIMS infrastructure used at the hospital, which has been supporting MDM processes for Australia’s largest peritonectomy practice since November last year.

Two new members have been added to the board of HL7NZ, which also saw all of the previous members re-elected.

This includes chairman Peter Jordan, vice chairman Peter Sergent, treasurer Edwin Ng and secretary Linda McKay. They have now been joined by Pegasus Health's David Moorhouse and HealthLink's John Carter.

A number of minor breaches of the My Health Record have been reported, including the ongoing problem of intertwined Medicare records, but there have been no purposeful or malicious attacks, the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) says.

Releasing its annual report yesterday, ADHA also reported of the five million or so consumers registered for a record, a total of 664,278 accessed their record via the consumer portal and 2217 unique healthcare provider organisations viewed records via their clinical information systems.

Australian Medicines Terminology-coded dispense records are being uploaded to the My Health Record from public hospitals in the Northern Territory through the territory's pharmacy solution, the Merlin system from Pharmhos.

NT Health started uploading the records on September 6 and they are being sent as separate CDA documents rather than embedded in a discharge summary, an Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) spokesperson has confirmed.

The Australasian College of Health Informatics (ACHI) is offering a four-year, full-time fellowship, including a year of paid work placements, leading to a PhD qualification in health informatics.

Established this year, the Australasian Health Informatics Fellowship Program (AHIFP) is designed to prepare people for roles in the health informatics workforce and to address demand for experienced health informaticians from various disciplines, including technical, health service management and clinical backgrounds.

Health Language Analytics Global has passed an acceptance test for automating the document classification and coding processes of the California Cancer Registry (CCR), and its Horizon technology is now scheduled to be part of the next CCR production release in January.

The global arm of Sydney-based natural language processing firm Health Language Analytics, HLA-Global has been working with the CCR on its modernisation campaign, which will see it receive all reports from service providers electronically and introduce efficiencies into the reportability and coding processes.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) expert committee on eHealth and practices systems is gearing up for its third annual eHealth forum, which will focus on electronic prescribing, digital healthcare and cyber security, and how blockchain may be applied in healthcare and health information security.

The college is also running its third annual national survey to develop a snapshot of the current trends of technology adoption in Australian general practice. Last year's survey showed that GPs remain optimistic about the use of eHealth technology and its ability to improve productivity and care coordination, but issues related to patient confidentiality and privacy are still the key barriers to adoption.

Publicly listed continence technology specialist Simavita has launched its new, low-cost AlertPLUS technology and is in discussions with major manufacturers of adult incontinence products and infant diapers as well to licence the intellectual property for these mass markets.

Simavita is best known for its Smart Incontinence Management (SIM) system, which allows incontinence assessments to be automated and a care plan for each individual developed. Originally aimed at high-care residential aged care facilities, the technology has also been simplified and made more mobile to allow it to be used for home aged and disability care.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending November 12:

‘NHS Cyber Security Batsignal’ peer-to-peer alerting system to launch next month
Digital Health News ~ Jon Hoeksma ~ 09/11/2017

The new community-developed incident and alerting service is designed to provide immediate alerts of future cyber security incidents and enable sharing of information on how to respond.

The promise, growth, and reality of mobile health – another data-free zone
New England Journal of Medicine ~ Amira Roess ~ 08/11/2017

The use of mobile communication technologies to improve the health of individuals and populations – dubbed “mobile health,” or “mHealth” – has grown dramatically since 2008, when the term mHealth became widely used.

The My Health Record was back in the news bigly this week as the Digital Health Agency announced that three community pharmacy software vendors had connected to the system, joining frontrunners Fred IT and Simple Retail, which both managed the feat way back in May 2013.

With 1404 out of the estimated 5500 pharmacies in Australia currently registered with the system as of November 5, that number is likely to increase substantially. Symbion's Minfos, for example, boasts about 800 pharmacies as customers, and with the Pharmacy Guild and the Pharmaceutical Society now behind the My Health Record, we expect many of the others will sign up soon enough.

Four new faces have joined the board of the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA) following its annual general meeting in Melbourne on Wednesday.

President Emma Hossack of Extensia and vice-president Tom Bowden of HealthLink were returned and previous board members David Loiterton, an aged care IT consultant, and Best Practice Software's Lorraine Pyefinch have joined them as treasurer and secretary respectively.

A provider readiness program that will see every clinician in Australia made aware of the My Health Record and how to direct patients to the opt-out procedure is set to kick off in the next month or two, followed by an extensive communications campaign beginning next year aimed at the general public.

Australian Digital Health Agency CEO Tim Kelsey said the agency is also planning to begin its promised consultation on interoperability in the next two months, which will see a draft set of standards developed for the approval of the COAG Health Council and will most probably include a recommendation to mandate the use of the Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) throughout the digital health system.

Auckland-based mHealth specialist Vensa Health has launched new repeat prescription request and payment applications for its Vensa.com platform, which hosts its free vAppointment booking system.

The company is also preparing to roll out applications for lab results and medical records next year, promising to provide these services to practices and patients for free.

A web-based risk calculator that uses a large data set solely from New Zealand's unique population is being launched next year, aimed at making more accurate, better-informed decisions about the risks and benefits of surgery.

Developed by Auckland City Hospital anaesthetist Doug Campbell and funded by the $38 million Precision Driven Health (PDH) initiative, the calculator will be freely available but is designed to be used by patients in consultation with their doctor.

Three extra community pharmacy software vendors have joined market leader Fred IT and Simple Retail in connecting to the My Health Record, allowing pharmacists to upload dispense records to the system and view hospital discharge summaries, shared health summaries and allergy information at the point of care.

Symbion-owned Minfos, now part of the EBOS group, has integrated with the national infrastructure, as has HealthSoft's RxOne and POS Works' Dispense Works. Fred Dispense and Aquarius have been integrated for a number of years.

The healthcare sector is currently looking at five different areas in which blockchain technology may potentially be applied, but it's early days yet and a commercial solution for any application is still some way off, IBM says.

IBM Australia's senior health adviser Annette Hicks told the HiNZ conference in New Zealand last week that blockchain has the potential to solve some of the challenges facing healthcare, but it will require collaboration from providers for it to succeed and there are currently few people equipped with the skills to turn its potential into reality.

ACT Health has won an international award from standards organisation GS1 for its implementation of positive patient identification (PPID) barcoding in the clinical setting.

The health service received specific recognition as part of the GS1 Healthcare Best Provider Implementation Case Study Award for its development of an interoperable standards framework to support safer, more sustainable care and processes for patients.

EMR vendor Allscripts has confirmed it will begin an implementation of its Sunrise clinical software at Latrobe Regional Hospital (LRH) this year, with plans to go live in the hospital's emergency department early next year.

As Pulse+IT reported last week, Allscripts has won the contract to roll out an EMR and community health solution for the Gippsland Health Alliance, beginning with the 289-bed LRH in what is the company's first foray with Sunrise in Victoria. The company is also rolling out the Sunrise administrative and clinical suites in South Australia, where it is better known as EPAS.

Federal, state and territory health ministers meeting in Canberra on Friday have approved a national policy framework for supporting the integration of genomic technologies into the national health system.

Ministers meeting for the COAG Health Council also received an update about scalability plans for jurisdictional infrastructure to support the expansion of the My Health Record to all Australians next year.

ASX-listed Hills Ltd is currently conducting a trial with an aged care provider of a dementia monitoring platform it has developed as it works to integrate its Hills Health Solutions division back into the company following its aborted merger with patient entertainment vendor Lincor.

The Adelaide firm, which is involved in a legal stoush in the NSW Supreme Court with Sydney-based patient entertainment vendor Stellar Vision over the proceeds of a joint contract with Western Sydney Local Health District, is also working on developing end-to-end solutions for the aged care market and hospitals involving its nurse call, security, communications and audio-visual assets as it attempts to return to profitability.

Auckland firm Vensa Health has won vendor association New Zealand Health IT's (NZHIT) innovation award, taking out the top award over Celo and Orion Health.

Vensa is best known for its TXT2Remind practice-patient messaging system, which is used by 70 per cent of the GP market in NZ to deliver health messages and appointment, screening and medication reminders.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending November 5:

NHS England CIO says service needs ‘at least’ another £4.2 billion for IT
Digital Health News ~ Jon Hoeksma ~ 02/11/2017

NHS England’s CIO Will Smart has said the NHS needs at least another £4.2 billion of IT investment to finish the job of digitisation.

The opportunity for a centralised EHR
eHealthNews South Africa ~ Vernon Foxcroft ~ 01/11/2017

Imagine a world in which all healthcare data was centralised. A world where both patient and provider had access to a patient’s full health record.

After the utter shambles that was last week in Canberra it was a relief for Pulse+IT to head over the Tasman to check out what the K Ones were up to at the annual Health Informatics New Zealand conference in Rotorua this week.

Having just come off their own drawn-out political saga we were wondering what the vibe was like over the ditch, what was happening with the New Zealand Digital Health Strategy, and whether it would turn out like the bit of a damp squib that Australia's seems to have done.

The team of dermatologists and technicians behind the DermNet New Zealand online skin disease library has taken out the Clinicians' Challenge active project category at the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ 2017) conference in Rotorua for its work on developing a skin disease image recognition tool.

DermNet was founded by Hamilton-based dermatologist Amanda Oakley and has been built over the last 20 years into the world's most online dermatology library, receiving visits from 18 million people last year alone.

EMR vendor Allscripts has won the contract to supply an electronic medical record and community health administration system for the Gippsland Health Alliance in what will be the first implementation for the US giant's Sunrise suite in Australia besides the huge EPAS system it is rolling out for the South Australian Health Department.

Allscripts also has a large footprint in Western Australia and Victoria with the BOSSnet digital medical record it bought following its acquisition of Core Medical Solutions in December last year.

DXC Technology is bringing its Health360 population health solution to the Australian and New Zealand market, promising to apply the principles of customer relationship management (CRM) to improve care coordination, customer engagement and customer experience.

Built on a platform of Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and its Dynamics 365 CRM application, the idea is to ensure that customers' situational and behavioural information as well as their clinical data is brought together to deliver more personalised care.

Southern Cross Hospitals has completed the first phase in its roll-out of Orion Health's Clinical Workstation, which has seen the organisation begin its move from paper to electronic for clinical documentation by concentrating on its nurses first.

Admissions data, three risk assessments, surgical site surveillance and discharge summaries are now captured electronically, and NZ's largest network of private surgical hospitals is now looking at moving into phase two, where it hopes to expand its use of electronic whiteboards into theatres, build an app for doctors to access information remotely, and get day to day care planning and nursing notes entered electronically.

Practising GP and associate professor in general practice at the University of Tasmania’s Launceston Clinical School Jan Radford has won a Churchill fellowship to study the large-scale collection of de-identified general practice data from electronic medical records.

Associate Professor Radford, who also co-convenes the Northern Tasmania General Practice-Based Research Network (PBRN), will travel to the UK and the Netherlands to find out how efforts to collate de-identified, electronic general practice health record data can be best used to improve patient care.

Christchurch Hospital has seen a huge reduction in length of stay in some of its general medical and surgical wards since it expanded the use of the locally developed Cortex mobile application, its creators say.

Cortex is a care coordination platform that provides documentation of clinical notes, team and individual task management, electronic ordering of diagnostic tests, notification of results availability and direct access to the results on iPads and iPhones at the bedside.

The New Zealand Ministry of Health has released its vision for health technology, which aims to guide the development of the ministry’s digital health strategy and technology strategies within the sector.

Described as a ‘living’ vision that will be refined and adapted over time in response to changing needs and emerging technology, the vision consists of nine themes that will help guide how technology is used to ensure better health for all New Zealanders.

The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital has issued a request for tender for a patient flow and queuing system for its outpatients clinics, requiring a system that can interface with the iPM patient administration system and Cerner EMR and is also capable of handling telehealth appointment types.

The Eye and Ear is undergoing a multi-year redevelopment that will see its 50-odd outpatients clinics consolidated on one level. Outpatients are currently housed temporarily with day surgery at the former Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre site and known as Eye and Ear on the Park.

Monash University has won $500,000 in funding to fast track research and development of an integrated patient management system that will act as a 'virtual hospital' for people with chronic diseases to keep them out of hospital.

The grant is one of 13 medical research projects announced today in the inaugural round of the $3 million Victorian Medical Research Acceleration Fund.

ASX-listed pharmacy dispense and point of sale vendor Corum Group has reported a $6.3 million impairment on goodwill on its legacy software products as it prepares for the roll-out of a new suite it is calling Corum Clear.

Corum announced in August that it expected to report an impairment on its existing LOTS, RPM and Amfac Windows Dispense (AWD) products. The company reported sales revenue of $14.8m, down 12 per cent on the previous year.

Digital health expert Will Reedy has been appointed to head up a new digital health practice for New Zealand cloud infrastructure firm Revera.

Revera provides cloud services to the Ministry of Health, Homecare Medical, Waikato District Health Board and Western Bay of Plenty PHO, among others. The company says it plans to offer more than just infrastructure modernisation and is focused on building a digital health ecosystem to help transform the delivery of healthcare across New Zealand.

Queensland Health has gone to market for a practice management enterprise solution (PMES) to replace the current practiX system, which vendor DXC Technology will no longer support after September 2018.

Queensland Health uses practiX to support the approximately 6100 senior medical officers it employs who also continue to work in private practice under the state's granted private practice arrangements (GPPA).

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending October 29:

Microsoft kills Kinect, but healthcare users will carry on
MobiHealthNews ~ Jonah Comstock ~ 26/10/2017

Microsoft is discontinuing the Kinect, its pioneering 3D motion-sensing camera. FastCo broke the news that the company will no longer manufacture the device, though it will support existing devices for the time being.

Bittersweet as Corbridge leaves Health Service Executive to return to UK
Digital Health News ~ Shireen Khalil ~ 26/10/2017

Richard Corbridge is looking forward to taking on his new role at one of the largest trusts in the UK but equally, he would have liked to see through one of the most significant and fundamental changes in the Irish healthcare system – the implementation of its electronic health record.

Political junkies were utterly entranced by the events in Canberra this week as Australia's 45th Parliament turned into an utter farce, the end result of which is that the government has lost its majority and the Senate has thankfully lost one of its looser marbles.

Senator-no-more Malcolm Roberts has been given the boot and few will miss his presence or his egregious attacks on science and the country's collective intelligence. At the same time, we have lost Fiona Nash as well. While she is a champion for rural Australians and their health, she rarely contributed much as the government's representative when the Senate community affairs committee examined the health portfolio during budget estimates hearings.

Department of Health officials say they have a “high level of confidence” that a fully functional National Cancer Screening Register (NCSR) will be ready by mid-January and that the first stage of the implementation, with limited functionality, will still be capable of supporting the introduction of the HPV-based cervical cancer screening program on December 1.

However, Pulse+IT's sources say the partially functioning register is too risky to proceed with and that pathology laboratories and jurisdictional health departments are concerned that the whole screening program is being placed in jeopardy.

GPs involved in the Western Sydney Integrated Care program (WSICP) are now able to send eReferrals from within the LinkedEHR shared care plan system to rapid access and stabilisation clinics (RAS) at Westmead and Blacktown hospitals, as the program moves into its next phase.

The clinics have been set up to allow patients with deterioration in chronic conditions such as diabetes, COPD, ischemic heart disease and congestive cardiac failure to be rapidly assessed and stabilised at the clinics, potentially avoiding a hospital admission. For those enrolled in the program, the shared care record is available to hospital specialists through the hospitals' Cerner EMR.

WSICP clinical lead Michael Crampton said general practices taking part in the Health Care Homes trials were now being incorporated into the program and offered the services it developed during its earlier phase, when it was known as the Western Sydney Integrated Care Demonstrator Project.

Multiple industry sources have come forward to claim that the National Cancer Screening Register being built by Telstra Health will not be fully operational in time for the December 1 start date of the new cervical cancer screening program.

While the Department of Health insists it is planned to be operational and will receive electronic test results from pathology laboratories, it has admitted that screening histories will not be able to be sent to labs from the national register, with the existing state and territory registers continuing to provide this service.

The state data will not be migrated until mid-January, the Department says. Our sources say this has serious implications for patient safety.

Medications adherence software vendor MedAdvisor will provide a customised version of its app to TerryWhite Chemmart as part of an investment in Australia's largest retail pharmacy brand by its owner, the EBOS Group, announced yesterday.

TerryWhite Chemmart says it plans to expand the services it offers to patients through the app as it moves into digital healthcare, including screening and pre-testing.

David Clark has been named as New Zealand's new Minister of Health, also taking on the role of associate minister of finance.

The 44-year-old is an ordained Presbyterian minister with a PhD and was once the warden of Selwyn College, a residential college of Otago University. He also previously worked as a Treasury analyst.

EMR vendor MEDITECH has begun the first Australian installation of its clinical suite at Chris O'Brien Lifehouse cancer hospital in Sydney.

Best known in Australia for providing patient administration and billing systems for Ramsay Health Care hospitals, MEDITECH has also had its full suite of patient administration modules implemented at Lifehouse for some time.

WA's Department of Health will go back to the market next month in its quest for a replacement medical imaging platform, having declined all offers it received in the last tender round last year.

In early tender advice, WA Health says it will release a draft for comment on November 6 with the estimated release of the final request set for November 27. The expected closing date is February 1, 2018.

Pharmacy wholesaler and medical consumables giant EBOS Group has invested $9.5 million in medications management platform MedAdvisor, with the ASX-listed firm also signing a preferred provider agreement with EBOS asset TerryWhite Chemmart to provide a customised app.

EBOS Group, which also owns the Symbion and Pharmacy Warehouse brands and the Minfos dispensing system, is now a significant shareholder in MedAdvisor with a holding of just over 14 per cent.

MedAdvisor plans to use the investment to boost its ventures into the hospital and GP sectors, open new markets in the UK, US and New Zealand and to expand its offering to the pharmacy sector.

The South Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Network and the not-for-profit technology organisation Infoxchange have launched a free online IT and eHealth resource for general practices.

Called ImproveIT, the site contains practical advice to help general practices to improve their use of IT and includes topics on IT management, practice IT, digital health, staff skills, and security and risk management.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending October 22:

MPs told that a further 162,000 medical documents undelivered
Digital Health News ~ Jon Hoeksma ~ 18/10/2017

MPs investigating the biggest ever loss of NHS medical correspondence have been told that 162,000 extra documents went missing, beyond the 702,000 pieces of NHS correspondence already known to have been undelivered.

KLAS 2017 interoperability report: some progress, but providers expecting more
Healthcare Informatics ~ Rajiv Leventhal ~ 19/10/2017

A KLAS examination of 420 healthcare organizations has revealed that while the number of providers engaging in “deep” interoperability has increased, the overwhelming majority are still not reporting interoperability success.

Pretty much every Kiwi and many Australians – and the odd dual citizen, like me and my cuzzy bro Barnaby – were pretty much transfixed to the telly on Thursday as we awaited Winston Peters' announcement about who he'd back to occupy the top floors of the Beehive, and didn't Winston just love the limelight.

Considering how long he'd taken to deliberate and then to deliver the verdict, his choice of Labour became increasingly likely, so NZ now has a young, attractive leader to rival the Trudeaus and Macrons of this world. It will be a couple of days yet before we know who will take over the health portfolio but most people's money would be on Labour nabbing the ministry, health policy being one of its traditional strengths.

Waitemata District Health Board has moved into phase two of its Leapfrog program, which works with DHB staff to develop and fast-track small, agile projects that have real-world applications for patient outcomes and patient experience.

The first phase laid the foundations for further stages of the program, concentrating initially on the DHB's mobility strategy and how it could be used to improve electronic prescribing and vital signs monitoring, as well as the use of a mobile voice to text technology.

New Zealand's South Island usually gets all the glory for the successful implementation of its island-wide shared care record known as HealthOne, which covers the million-strong population and is accessible to primary and secondary care, but work has been underway in the lower North Island for a number of years on the roll out of that region's Shared Care Record, which harnesses the power of the patient portals that are increasingly proliferating throughout the country.

What started in Wellington has now extended out to the Hutt Valley and up to Manawatu-Wanganui and about 700,000 people now have a record. The Shared Care Record project uses Medtech's ManageMyHealth platform to create a record that is accessible at the push of a button in the region's hospitals, and the portal part of which is also an essential element in the Health Care Homes model that is also increasingly being adopted in New Zealand.