The last quarter of 2016 started off with a hangover from the third, with the ongoing sagas of the ePIP and the National Cancer Screening Register lingering like last week's beer on Boxing Day. Things did pick up a bit though with bright, fresh faces fronting the new digital health agency and even some old stagers from the secure messaging industry getting a new lease on life through what seems a concerted effort to get things right this time.

The government then fell into a new round of skirmishes with the general practice community over the Health Care Homes initiative and it all fell to pieces, but on the good news front, the state and territory governments and health services seem to be purring away nicely with some pretty enormous eHealth infrastructure projects, barring one or two missteps, natch.

Winning a federal election and retaining her role as minister for health should have given Sussan Ley a plum start to the second half of the year, but as is the case for many politicians who put their hand up for this most difficult and treacherous portfolio – let's face it: you can never win – Ms Ley was bowled a few wrong'uns that would have made Shane Warne proud.

While some of them were pure bad luck, others were of her, her office or her department's own making, like not ensuring legislation enabling the establishment of the National Cancer Screening Register was passed by Parliament before awarding the contract to Telstra Health and not funding the Health Care Home initiative to the level required by the RACGP. Unlike Warne's career, Ms Ley's new term in government started well but looks like ending disastrously, with another doctors' revolt on her hands and even noises of a reshuffle in the wind.

The second quarter of the eHealth year was a big one, involving a vanilla federal budget for healthcare that was left in the freezer for too long, a dash of openness from the new Australian Digital Health Agency, a dollop of moolah through some biggish tenders for new jurisdictional clinical system implementations, and a great big Flake on top as general and specialist medical practice software vendors heralded the next steps in the cloud.

In between times, dead people were offered a My Health Record, the draft national digital health strategy peaked a little early, and some pretty cool stuff happened in telehealth. Telstra Health would beam with joy as it snaffled the National Cancer Screening Register contract and then plunge into despair as the general public cottoned on, and the My Health Record system hit four million registrations as NEHTA finally departed the scene, mourned by few.

Even before last month's national conference for the Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA) and National Centre for Classification in Health (NCCH) opened, it was clear that health information management really is “at the heart of healthcare”, the theme for this year’s event.

In opening the annual conference for Australia’s health information management (HIM) and clinical classification peak bodies respectively, the secretary of Victoria's Department of Health and Human Services Kym Peake described state of the art developments for Australia’s health reform 'pathfinder' jurisdiction, particularly in the area of eHealth, and health information management and clinical classification were central to reform at every turn.

A former WA Health chief nurse and deputy CEO of the UK's Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust has been appointed as the new CEO of the Northern Territory Department of Health.

Catherine Stoddart, who started her career as a nurse in WA, has previously held the roles of chief nurse and midwifery officer at the WA Department of Health, regional director of health for the Kimberley region and executive director of nursing at the WA Country Health Service.

2016 was the year in which the term eHealth was shown the door and everything turned bright and shiny and 'digital', when the laser light on state health IT roll-outs swapped from WA to SA and then up to the NT, when PCEHR became MyHR, NEHTA became ADHA and acronym lovers could find many fertile fields.

While we are yet to find an adequate description for the difference between eHealth and digital health, the federal government geared up for a digital election year by spruiking newly installed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's favourite innovative digital shiny toy (or shiny digital innovative toy), also known as the Digital Transformation Office (DTO).

This gang of Agile scrummagers, alphas and betas was quickly rechristened the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) and it somehow managed to lose its inaugural CEO by November, but back in January, it all sounded super exciting.

In a week that was dominated by chatter about the purchase of a smallish Aussie EMR vendor by a global EMR behemoth and the never-assuaged desire for news of all things My Health Record, it was a nice yarn about two Top Enders adapting what tools they had at hand to a job that needed doing that piqued the curiosity of many of our readers.

They have built a bespoke system that takes reports from two commercial products – CSC's MedChart ePrescribing system and InterSystems' TrakCare Lab pathology system – dumps them into an Excel spreadsheet and runs them through a series of rules. At the end is a practical and easy to use antimicrobial stewardship system that they believe has prevented many adverse events.

US-based EMR vendor Allscripts and local EMR developer Core Medical Solutions (CMS) plan to offer a platform of complementary products to new and existing customers but will retain their Sunrise and BOSSnet brands following the multinational's acquisition of Adelaide's CMS earlier this week.

CMS will also retain its base in Adelaide, where it was first established by hospital doctors Rohan Ward and Marc Belej 15 years ago, and where Allscripts has its major Australian client, the South Australian Department for Health.

A team from the Northern Territory's Top End Health Service is using a clever, in-house designed system that combines reports from the pathology and prescribing databases in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, processes them through a series of rules and is then able to identify potentially life-threatening drug-bug or dose mismatches.

While the developers are not considering commercialising the system and are happy to give it away as freeware, they have come up with a nifty acronym – AMSID, for AntiMicrobial Stewardship Identification – and more importantly believe that they have come up with a quality improvement initiative that can have a significant impact on patient safety.

Improved electronic interfaces between aged care, pharmacy and general practice clinical software and the integration of the My Aged Care referral form into GP desktop software are part of the wish list from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) in its response to the government's Aged Care Legislated Review.

The AMA also urges that changes be made to MBS rebates to encourage GP attendance at residential aged care facilities (RACFs), including through telehealth, the removal of practical impediments to working in RACFs such as not being given electronic access codes for after-hours visits, and that improvements be made to communication systems between aged care staff, the residents’ GP, My Aged Care, and Aged Care Assessment Teams (ACATs).

Brisbane's Metro North Hospital and Health Service (HHS) has issued an invitation to offer for a new electronic prescribing and medication administration (EPMA) system to replace its current manual, paper prescribing and administration processes.

As part of its electronic medications management (EMM) plan 2016-21, Metro North wants to try out a commercial off-the-shelf system, providing electronic medication prescribing, reviewing and administration functionality with clinical decision support, in two wards over two years with a view to rolling it out to all facilities if it proves successful.

Pharmacy dispensing software market leader Fred IT has signed a deal with Sigma Pharmaceuticals to roll out its Fred NXT cloud-based solution to Sigma's 700-strong pharmacy chain.

Fred IT, which is half-owned by the Pharmacy Guild and half by Telstra Health, will deploy Fred NXT as a fully integrated retail platform, including dispense, point-of-sale and back office functionality, over the next two years.

Western Victoria Primary Health Network (PHN) CEO Jason Trethowan is leaving the organisation to take up the top job at youth mental health initiative Headspace.

Mr Trethowan, who was also CEO of the PHN's predecessors the General Practitioners Association of Geelong and Barwon Medicare Local, has long been a champion for the use of eHealth in primary care, having been heavily involved in one of the Wave 2 sites for the implementation of the PCEHR.

The federal government has spent $1.15 billion on the development, implementation and ongoing operation of the My Health Record, formerly known as the personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR), up to June 30 this year, according to the Department of Health.

The figure tallies with budget allocations since the system was first funded in the 2010/2011 budget. Up to the 2017/18 financial year, the total budget allocation will be $1,204,516,000.

The Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) has partnered with the Texas Medical Center (TMC), a 57-organisation strong “medical city” in Houston, to create a health technology start-up program where emerging technologies can be developed and accelerated to advance patient care.

Called the BioBridge, the program will see Australian companies given access to TMC’s Innovation Institute and TMCx, a life sciences business accelerator.

International standards development organisation Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) will focus on two emerging standards – FHIR and DICOMweb – in addition to medical device integration at its connectathon and showcase at the Health Informatics Conference (HIC) in Brisbane next year.

IHE Australia, which is holding a webinar next week on how healthcare providers and software vendors can take part, held a highly successful half-day workshop in advance of HIC 2016 on developments in interconnecting patient care devices (PCD) to electronic medical records (EMRs), both in the hospital and the home.

Assistive technology provider Tunstall has taken its new Smart Hub home medical alarm on a test drive in Queensland to ensure it works well in rural and remote areas with poor mobile reception.

The medical alarm has been built with GSM technology to operate on the 3G mobile network and works independently of the NBN or landline infrastructure.

Health insurer HCF has partnered with digital health platform Healthshare to allow GPs and patients to search for specialists participating in HCF's Known Gap or No Gap scheme, with the GP than able to use Healthshare's referrals platform to automatically populate a referral.

Healthshare launched its specialist referrals app on the MedicalDirector Sidebar in March last year, allowing GPs to search for convenient specialists and write a referral that is automatically populated with both the patient's information drawn from the practice management system and the specialist's from Healthshare's directory with the click of a button.

US EMR giant Allscripts has acquired Core Medical Solutions, the Adelaide-based software developer behind the BOSSnet clinical information system used in a number of Victorian health services and being rolled out throughout Western Australia.

Core Medical Solutions (CMS), which was founded by doctors Rohan Ward and Marc Belej in 2001, will remain based in Adelaide and will operate as an Allscripts subsidiary.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending December 4:

21st Century Cures Act brings provisions for EHRs, interoperability, precision medicine
Healthcare IT News ~ Jessica Davis ~ 01/12/2016

Despite the House's overwhelming approval of the $6.3 billion bill, the legislation also contains controversial components, such as deregulating the FDA's device and drug approval process.

Harris Computer Corporation acquires iMDsoft
eHealthNews.eu ~ Staff writer ~ 02/12/2016

iMDsoft, a global leader in clinical information systems, today announced that it has been acquired by Harris Computer Corporation, an arm of the Constellation Software group.

Our little scoop on Tuesday about the shortlist for the Northern Territory's $186 million Core Clinical Systems Renewal Program (CCSRP) was by far the most-read story for the week and one of the most popular for the year, and last week's story about how Royal Children’s Hospital has fared with its new EMR wasn't far behind.

The release of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services' (DHHS) digital health strategy, which included some interesting tidbits on the EMR plans of some its health services, was also popular, as were the ever-interesting dramas surrounding the much-maligned EPAS in South Australia.

The South Australian Department for Health expects to remediate a number of unexpected errors identified by the SA Auditor-General by March 2017, including an instance where system users are inadvertently cancelling outpatients imaging orders in the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS), and a situation where the new Enterprise System for Medical Imaging (ESMI) is not able to effectively record radiation doses.

SA Health says its EPAS program has implemented a number of fixes to resolve issues with unresponsive or crashing devices, with a key fix implemented in August that has provided significant relief, and has also promised to increase controls for provider and prescriber numbers registered in EPAS to ensure non-clinical staff are unable to place patient treatment-related orders.

A strategy to replace Ascribe's Symphony emergency department system at four health services in Victoria is one of the top priorities for the state's Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for the coming year, but under its Digitising Health strategy released this month, the department will continue in its role as a 'health system manager' overseeing a devolved healthcare sector rather than implement a centralised investment approach similar to that of NSW and Queensland.

Unlike the ambitious but ultimately failed HealthSmart program, in which a a top-down approach was taken to rolling out a number of technologies such as the Cerner electronic medical record and the iPM patient administration system from CSC, the strategy continues with the devolved approach to decision making recommended by a ministerial review panel in the Clinical ICT Systems in the Victorian Public Health Sector report in 2013.

Clintel has gone live with the MIMS medicines database fully integrated into its browser-based system, which is aimed predominantly at high-volume medical specialists and day hospitals but is also available for other healthcare providers such as aged and home care organisations.

The South Australian-based company has flown relatively under the radar over the last 18 months as it refines the CareRight platform, its new, modular, configurable system that can be hosted in the cloud or locally installed.

The developers behind the clinical communications platform Oculo have signed an agreement with Global Transcription Services (GTS) to link their services, allowing ophthalmologists to have their dictation transcribed and sent to referring optometrists and GPs seamlessly.

Melbourne-headquartered Oculo has been picking up steam lately, signing up with HealthLink to streamline GP-to-optometrist referrals and integrating with the VIP.net clinical software system from Best Practice from next year.

WA-based residential aged, home and disability care provider Brightwater Group has partnered with Tunstall Healthcare to offer Tunstall's integrated care platform to clients of Brightwater's At Home Services.

Brightwater ran a six-month pilot of the technology last year involving four clients living at home, with a permanent program beginning last September.

Four electronic medical record vendors have made the shortlist for the Northern Territory's $186 million Core Clinical Systems Renewal Program (CCSRP), which will see the NT become the first jurisdiction in Australia to roll out an end-to-end clinical information system to all healthcare providers at the point of care.

Two of the four have existing relationships with NT Health although one is a relative newcomer, and the shortlist is notable as much for who is on it as who missed out.

Surgeons specialising in minimally invasive gynaecological procedures are set to begin using a locally developed data analysis tool to track and minimise post-operative complications.

Brisbane-based SurgicalPerformance, which was founded by practising gynaecological oncologist Andreas Obermair, has partnered with the Australasian Gynaecological Endoscopy & Surgery Society (AGES) to introduce the tool to its 600 members in Australia and New Zealand from January 2017.

The New Zealand Ministry of Health has issued a request for proposal for the supply of an oral health information system solution, part of the national Electronic Oral Health Record (EOHR) program.

The ministry is looking for software that can be offered on a large scale in a multi-site environment, preferably as a software as a service or centrally hosted deployment to overcome the current issue of each district health board (DHB) having to provide local support and enhancements.

Independent optician network ProVision will promote the services of health portal 1stAvailable to its members for their online appointment booking needs following a successful pilot.

ProVision, which counts 440 independent optometrists in its network, conducted a pilot in 20 practices between August and November and has now begun active promotion of 1stAvailable's platform to its members.

Orion Health hopes to achieve profitability in the 2018 financial year as revenue continues to grow and its large investment in research and development for its Amadeus precision medicine platform begins to level off.

Announcing its first half results for the 2017 financial year, Orion Health CEO Ian McCrae said the company had operating revenue of $NZ104 million, with $25m coming from the Asia Pacific region.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending November 27:

Ireland to go live with national maternity electronic record
Digital Health News ~ Ben Heather ~ 22/11/2016

Ireland’s biggest maternity hospital will go-live with Cerner next month, as part of an upgrade that will see all its maternity units switch to the electronic health record system.

Major health IT event opens with recognition of most digitally mature hospitals
eHealthNews EU ~ Staff writer ~ 24/11/2016

Tire Devlet Hastanesi in Izmir Hospital, in Turkey was awarded EMRAM Stage 7, which demonstrates the highest level of digital maturity in a hospital.

One of the more interesting stats in a presentation chock full of them given by Nepean Blue Mountains PHN's Donna Sedgman at Pen Computer Systems' PHN conference in Sydney last week was that GPs in her catchment were three times more likely to be able to see a patient's discharge summary on the My Health Record (MyHR) than they were to receive it by secure messaging.

While the vast majority of GPs surely would prefer that they receive it by the latter route, in the absence of that happening reliably the MyHR does provide an alternative, not the least because those hospitals that are linked to the system – and there are quite a lot of them now, including the subject of one of our most popular stories this week, Royal Children's Hospital – are sending discharge summaries up for those patients who have a record.

The WA Department of Health has released its long-awaited request for tender for a new medical imaging platform (MIP), which is set to replace the legacy Agfa Quadrat radiology information system and Agfa Impax picture archiving and communication system used since 2003.

WA Health is looking for a proven off the shelf platform that includes a vendor neutral archive (VNA) to be rolled out throughout the state's hospitals, including the tertiary hospitals in metropolitan Perth, at an expected budget of around $52 million.

It's close on seven months since Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital took the plunge and went live with its Epic electronic medical record (EMR), turning on all functionality at three o'clock in the morning and moving from a hybrid paper system to fully electronic virtually overnight.

The hospital still uses its existing pathology, radiology and patient administration systems but these will likely be phased out down the track as the full Epic enterprise suite – the first in Australia – is rolled out.

Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital has invited expressions of interest in providing an out-of-hospital mobile communications system for Apple and Android phones for people staffing its Hospital in the Home (RCH@Home), Paediatric Infant Perinatal Emergency Retrieval (PIPER) and mental health services and emergency management.

The idea is to use technology to reduce the number of phone calls, use dashboard displays for messages that can be aggregated by team and conversation thread, and provide location and duress alarm capabilities.

Waikato District Health Board (DHB) has signed up nearly 3000 people to its Virtual DHB online healthcare service, which has been rebranded as SmartHealth and is now providing video chat capability between the renal department and transplant and dialysis patients at home.

The new service was launched earlier this year and is based on the HealthTap technology from the US, allowing patients to connect with hospital clinicians by video, phone and text through an app on their smartphone or tablet or home browser for appointments where they don't need a physical examination.

ASX-listed health technology firm Jayex Healthcare is still on track to further roll out its Enlighten arrivals kiosk platform, commercialise its Pharmacy Delivery 2 U (P2U) prescription delivery service and grow its Appointuit business despite an ongoing dispute with the founders of the popular online appointments booking service.

Appointuit co-founders Rosemary and Gordon Cooper, who are still employed by Jayex and are substantial shareholders following Jayex's acquisition of Appointuit last year, have brought action against the parent company through the Fair Work Commission and the Federal Court.

Adelaide-headquartered clinical software firm Clintel has added a new image management module and drawing tool to its CareRight solution.

Aimed predominantly at medical specialists, the module allows users to take photos and upload them directly from a smartphone, with each patient having their own photo image gallery.

Melbourne-based video consulting specialist Attend Anywhere has won a contract to provide its distributed telehealth model and web-based management platform to NHS Scotland.

The company will be working with the Scottish Centre for Telehealth and Telecare (SCTT) as part of its £30m Technology Enabled Care (TEC) program, which from early next year will allow any Scottish citizen to access their primary care and specialist appointments via video call.

Brisbane's Herston Health Precinct is set to host a new biofabrication institute dedicated to developing 3D imaging, computational modelling and printing technologies to create “the hospital of the future”, in which patient-specific tissue including bone, cartilage and even organs can be created.

A partnership between Metro North Hospital and Health Service (HHS) and Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the Biofabrication Institute will open in 2017 on the Herston site, which includes the old Royal Children's Hospital and neighbours the Royal Brisbane and Women's, Queensland's largest hospital.

Victoria's largest ever regional hospital development, the $630 million Bendigo Hospital, has been completed a month ahead of schedule, allowing extra time for simulation exercises and readiness testing before patients are transferred in at the end of January.

The new hospital will roll out InterSystems' TrakCare electronic medical record at the end of 2017, with a digital medical record (DMR) solution from Vitro Software currently being used as an interim measure at the existing hospital.

Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) CEO Tim Kelsey has offered a mea culpa for the past mistakes of his agency's predecessor and promised to try to set things right in eHealth in Australia, accepting that digital health had been “oversold and under-delivered” but urging clinicians and the public not to pull the plug just yet.

Mr Kelsey told Pen Computer Systems' National PHN Conference in Sydney last week that the ADHA had targeted several priority programs, including the already announced focus on secure messaging interoperability, but also planned to “rapidly enhance” the My Health Record through a three-pronged approach that would make it more attractive to clinicians to use.

Clinicians working in the drug and alcohol and mental health fields are the largest clinical groups viewing patients' My Health Records, while emergency department staff are highly resistant to doing so, preliminary results from one of the opt-out trials show.

The trial in the Nepean Blue Mountains Primary Health Network (NBMPHN) catchment also showed that GPs are three times more likely to be able to view a patient's hospital discharge summary on the My Health Record (MyHR) than receive it by secure messaging.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending November 20:

FHIR pilot at Regenstrief aims to take data integration to new levels
Healthcare Informatics ~ Rajiv Leventhal ~ 17/11/2016

Schleyer says it was about three years ago when Graham Grieve, the co-creator of the FHIR standard, approached Regenstrief about its potential.

Digital patient tech may not save money - Nuffield report
Digital Health News ~ Lyn Whitfield ~ 17/11/2016

Politicians and policy makers should not assume that digital patient technologies will produce big savings, particularly in the short-term, the Nuffield Trust has warned.

The much-maligned My Health Record has been out of the news for a while now as the two opt-out trials in NSW and Queensland go through their motions and the opt-in trials being held in Victoria and WA continue to fly under the radar.

The official conclusion of the widely publicised opt-out version was October 31, and it is expected that the evaluation being managed by Siggins Miller – which has been undertaken while the trials are in progress – will be finalised and presented to the government early in the new year.

The Department of Defence is considering extending the current contract it has with CSC for its Defence eHealth System (DeHS) primary care clinical system as it looks toward a larger health system modernisation program beginning in 2021.

Pulse+IT has heard from several sources that Defence was thinking of going out to market for alternatives to DeHS, which is used for primary healthcare provision for Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel stationed locally and was only rolled out in 2014 and 2015.

Telstra remains committed to its Telstra Health division despite a change in one of the three 'pillars' of the company's overall strategy and the forthcoming retirement of the division's inaugural managing director, Shane Solomon.

Telstra CEO Andy Penn (pictured) told an investor briefing in Sydney today that while the company was now aiming to build growth closer to its core business, it remained committed to both Telstra Health and its Ooyala intelligent video platform investment.

Not-for-profit health information provider Health Navigator New Zealand is piloting a project to build a health app library that will rate the quality and safety of health apps and provide ratings for consumers and clinicians on the credibility of health and wellness apps.

The app library currently has about 30 apps that have undergone clinical, user and technical reviews along with independent formal reviews to test not just usability but an evidence-base and relevance to local terminology and measurements.

A disposable device that clips onto a smartphone and can be used as a digital dermatoscope for examining skin lesions and a custom-designed virtual reality experience for children in hospital have taken out the inaugural Bytes4health program, picking up $25,000 each to further develop the technology.

Bytes4health was designed by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) in collaboration with digital health agency Curve Tomorrow to help bring along new health technology products that will hopefully benefit the health of seriously ill children and the wider population.

eHealth NSW has partnered with the Sydney Local Health District to work towards creating a customised view for clinicians within the hospital electronic medical record of diabetic patients' insulin therapy.

Called the Insulin MPage, the consolidated screen will show trends in blood glucose readings with data on administered insulin therapy and display them together in colour-coded, user-friendly formats.

Global EMR giant Cerner Corporation is looking at adapting a successful model it has developed with Chicago-based hospital group Advocate Health Care to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions in the Australian setting.

The model is based around automated, continuous calculations of risk scores for certain conditions based on real-time data from the existing electronic medical record (EMR) and the use of care plans for high-risk populations.

Medical communications specialist and digital strategist Ann-Marie Cavanagh has been appointed as the permanent chief technology and digital services officer with the New Zealand Ministry of Health.

Ms Cavanagh, who is a clinical pharmacologist by training, is currently head of digital strategy for global medical affairs with Novartis Pharma in Switzerland. She will start her new role with the MoH on December 5.

South Australia's Hills Ltd has deferred the proposed merger of its Hills Health Solutions (HHS) division with patient infotainment system vendor Lincor until next year, citing current market volatility.

Hills announced in September that it planned to hive off HHS and merge it into a new entity called Lincor Limited, with the company intending to issue an initial public offering and list on the ASX. Shares in the new company would go to existing Hills shareholders as part of the demerger of HHS.

The CSIRO is lending its Remote-I low-cost imaging technology to a new trial enabling GPs to screen for diabetic retinopathy (DR) and avoid patients having to be referred unnecessarily to a specialist.

CSIRO is conducting the trial with the GP Superclinic at Midland Railway Workshops in Perth for the next six months, imaging up to 200 patients for the early stages of DR.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending November 13:

Donald Trump's healthcare plans: The good, bad, and the very ugly
Healthcare IT News ~ Henry Powderly ~ 10/11/2016

The president-elect has already laid out a plan that many feel will cause massive disruption to the industry.

E-discharge standards to GPs 'poor'
Digital Health News ~ Ben Heather ~ 10/11/2016

Central NHS organisations are rebooting attempts to improve communication between emergency departments and GPs, with the ‘perpetual winter’ crisis now affecting the NHS spurring new efforts.

Best Practice, which markets the leading ophthalmology clinical management software brand VIP.net, has signed an agreement with online clinical communications platform Oculo to integrate their two systems and open up eReferrals for ophthalmologists.

VIP.net, which Best Practice purchased as part of its acquisition of Houston Medical last year, has a strong user base among ophthalmologists and has a number of integrations with the specialist equipment and devices used by eye care professionals.

Dose individualisation software pioneer DoseMe has partnered with fellow Brisbane firm Charm Health to integrate its personalised medicines dosing tool with Charm's specialist oncology information management system.

Clinicians using Charm will be provided with immediate access to the DoseMe library of individualised dosing models, which is expected to significantly enhance clinical decision-making when it comes to dose adjustment of chemotherapy and other medicines used in cancer care.

US-based enterprise information platform vendor Hyland has signed up 10 Australian hospitals for its OnBase by Hyland enterprise content management system for health records.

While it has been working behind the scenes here for a couple of years, the company has announced that OnBase has now gone live at Mater Hospital in Brisbane, is integrated into Melbourne Health's new clinical viewer and is also being used for scanning functions and integrated with the Epic system that went live six months ago at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital.

Auckland-based mobile health solutions developer Vensa Health has launched an online appointment booking platform that it is offering for free to all general practices in New Zealand.

The Vensa.com platform will allow patients to book appointments with their doctor, nurse or clinic through a mobile app, which is then linked through the Vensa platform to the practice's appointments book in Medtech or MyPractice. Valentia Technologies is also in discussions about coming on board.

Orion Health product strategist and FHIR clinical expert David Hay was named 'chair emeritus' in perpetuity of HL7 New Zealand in recognition of the eight years he spent as chair of the group, the new board of which met for the first time this week.

Dr Hay, who remains an elected member of the board and will continue to lead initiatives on the FHIR standard, has been replaced as chairman by Patients First solutions architect and previous HL7NZ vice-chairman Peter Jordan.

The aged care industry has commissioned the Flinders University Medical Device Research Institute to scope out the technological needs it thinks will be required to allow the sector to remain sustainable into the future.

The Aged Care Industry IT Company (ACiiTC) – which emerged from what was formerly known as the Aged Care Industry IT Council – commissioned the work to complement the aged care sector roadmap released by a government-appointed committee earlier this year.

The Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) has developed an education program to assist GPs and practice staff to integrate eHealth technologies such as the My Health Record and telehealth as part of a patient-centred approach to chronic disease management.

ACRRM president Ruth Stewart said the program's approach was based on a model of shared care, made viable by eHealth tools, that targeted patients in underserved rural and remote regions of Australia.

The US subsidiary of Australian firm Health Language Analytics (HLA) has signed an agreement with California's Public Health Institute (PHI) to use its Horizon machine learning platform to extract and codify cancer data from pathology text reports for the California Cancer Registry (CCR) program.

Health Language Analytics-Global (HLA-Global) is the US arm of HLA, set up in Sydney several years ago by well known computer scientist and information technologist Jon Patrick to commercialise his clinical natural language processing technology.

Melbourne-based companies Global Health and HealthKit have joined forces to integrate the former's ReferralNet secure messaging service into the latter's cloud-based practice management software platform.

The integration is aimed at all HealthKit users but particularly those working in mental health, which HealthKit says numbers about 4000.

HL7 Australia elected a new board and chair at its annual general meeting yesterday, with former board member and enterprise architect Jason Steen, who just recently finished a stint with eHealth NSW and is now sole director of consulting firm KISS Software, taking over as chairman from Equipoise International's Nat Wong.

The secretary is former Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services' deputy CIO, eHealth strategic adviser and Semantic Consulting managing director Tim Blake.

Back-up plans and business continuity protocols worked as expected during a period yesterday when South Australia's Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) was out of action, with the glitch affecting all hospitals using the system until it was restored at midnight last night, SA Health says.

The doctors' and nurses' unions were hopping mad at the glitch, which saw a small piece of software malfunction and slow down the whole system so much that some hospitals reverted to documenting on paper.

All general practices wanting to take part in the federal government's Health Care Homes trial must be registered for and contribute to the My Health Record, enrolled patients must also have a My Health Record and practices must provide enhanced access for enrolled patients through in-hours telephone support, email or video conferencing.

The Department of Health has released details of what will be required of the 200 general practices and Aboriginal community controlled health services (ACCHS) chosen for the first stage of the trial, which will deliver services from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2019.

Technology services giant Accenture and NZ strategic consulting firm MartinJenkins have won a contract to develop a two-stage business case for the country's proposed single electronic health record (EHR).

The Accenture consortium will work with the Ministry of Health's EHR project team on an indicative business case, which will be presented to the government in early June 2017. The Ministry said that if the indicative business case is accepted by Cabinet, a detailed business case would then follow later in the year.

A survey of attitudes towards the My Aged Care system has found that care recipients have a positive view of the service and aged care in Australia in general, but that GPs were only moderately satisfied with how the new centralised referral process helped them refer patients and aged care assessors and providers were dissatisfied with the quality of client information being provided.

The survey found that overall satisfaction with the central 'match and refer' role of My Aged Care was moderate, with 41 per cent of service providers and health professionals indicating satisfaction, but while most found dealing with the contact centre to be a pleasant and informative experience, the appropriateness of the outcome for the client was seen as poor by a large minority.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending November 6:

Criminal investigation after trust downed in cyber attack
Digital Health News ~ Laura Stevens ~ 03/11/2016

Police are now investigating after a computer virus shut down three northern hospitals for four days.

Digital programs are close to earning CMS's approval
MobiHealthNews ~ Staff writer ~ 04/11/2016

While the final version of the CMS’s 2017 physician payment rule made clear it would move forward with extending Medicare coverage to diabetes prevention programs, the parameters for how digital versions would be included remain unclear.

Shane Solomon, the inaugural head and driving force behind Telstra's healthcare division, has announced to staff that he will retire as managing director of the company early next year.

Mr Solomon, who helped establish Telstra Health in 2013 with a vision of joining up the disparate parts of the healthcare sector using established technologies, will officially retire in February, although Telstra spokesman Steve Carey said he would continue as an advisor to Telstra on the delivery of the National Cancer Screening Register, including as chair of the project control board.

A concept for a shared pre-operative workbench submitted by an anaesthetist and the development of a telehealth application for monitoring tuberculosis treatment have taken out the top prizes in the 2016 Clinicians Challenge, presented at the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Auckland last night.

Mark Fisher (pictured), an anaesthetist at Counties Manukau DHB, won the top prize in the new ideas category for his proposal, a smart preoperative system for elective surgery patients to make their pathway visible to the entire multidisciplinary team.

GS1 Australia and the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) will launch a data quality improvement program later this month to ensure the quality of information kept and shared on the National Product Catalogue (NPC) is maintained.

The NPC is a single repository of product details and pricing data for healthcare products including medical devices, consumables and pharmaceuticals and is used by all state and territory health departments and public and private hospitals.

The NZ Ministry of Health's new Digital Advisory Board will take a “bi-modal approach” to innovation in the sector, but board members Mike Rillstone and Murray Milner provided little other detail about its intended strategy in a presentation to the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Auckland today.

Mr Rillstone and Dr Milner told the conference that the digital health strategy would align closely with the overall NZ health strategy but unlike the very detailed strategies developed by the now-disbanded National Health IT Board, the new DAB seems to still be in its formative stages.

A former colleague of Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) CEO Tim Kelsey is set to take up the high-profile role overseeing the functioning of the My Health Record system from early next year.

Ronan O'Connor, who worked with Mr Kelsey at NHS England, has been appointed as executive general manager (EGM) of ADHA's Core Systems Operations division.

Melbourne-based digital health platform provider Health& officially launched its online health management platform at the GP16 conference in Perth recently, following a soft launch of the personal health record and consumer portal technology – which is intended to draw data from the My Health Record among other sources – earlier this year.

As Pulse+IT reported at the time, Health& had secured the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) as an equity partner through its RACGP Oxygen subsidiary. The company is now working to provide Australian GPs and patients with access to the platform and distributing user guides to clinics across Australia to introduce patients to the Health& system.

New Zealand Health Minister Jonathan Coleman outlined his vision for the development of New Zealand's digital health strategy by 2020 at the HiNZ conference in Auckland today, naming the single electronic health record (EHR) as the next frontier in achieving better health outcomes and highlighting the number of patients accessing patient portals and the new National Telehealth Service as examples of new ways of delivering and receiving care through digital technologies.

Dr Coleman said it was a year to the day that the new telehealth service went live, and in that time around 425,000 people had used the service. Growth in monthly calls is booming and more services and channels will be added over the coming months, including new mental health services.

Telstra Health has charged ahead with the development of the National Cancer Screening Register (NCSR) despite recent public controversy over its contract win, having now completed the 'discovery' phase involving consulting on business processes with the existing bowel and cervical screening registers.

According to the latest update on the build of the register from the NCSR implementation branch at the Department of Health, Telstra Health has built infrastructure for pathology providers to be able to exchange messages with the register, which will soon be provided to providers to test against.

Monash Health is on the lookout for an oncology solution for the prescribing and scheduling of chemotherapy that can work as a standalone solution now and integrate in future with the planned electronic medical record (EMR).

Victoria's largest public health service plans to implement Cerner's Millennium EMR and has secured funding for the first phase, which will see the roll out of clinical documentation, electronic orders and results, electronic decision support, electronic medications management for prescribing and administration, and an emergency department module.

Queensland's West Moreton Hospital and Health Service (WMHHS) has partnered with Royal Philips to launch an integrated care program aimed at people with complex chronic illnesses at risk of hospitalisation, using Philips' eCareCompanion telemonitoring platform and tailored management plans.

Philips said comparable ambulatory care programs it has been involved with in the US and the UK have demonstrated that there can be large reductions in resource utilisation as well as inpatient and emergency department costs by using the technology, which includes video conferencing capability and vital signs monitoring using peripheral devices.

Medication adherence platform vendor MedAdvisor has finalised its purchase of pharmacy software developer Healthnotes for $5.5 million, with the combined company now active in 2400 community pharmacies, representing about 45 per cent of the market.

ASX-listed MedAdvisor recently raised $8m in total to buy Healthnotes and invest further in its technology platform, which includes a new GP Link service and a move last week into the acute care setting following an agreement with health insurer Bupa and private hospital operator Healthscope.

Residential and community aged care provider Feros Care has launched a new trial in its quest to support residents and older people living at home by using simple, easily available technology, creating a 'virtual senior centre' through tablet computers to connect seniors to social activities and healthcare information broadcast online.

Feros Care, which has several representatives including CEO Jennene Buckley presenting at the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Auckland this week, is a recognised leader in using video conferencing and other telehealth technologies to support residents in its three residential aged care facilities and for its clients in the community.

$6.3 million NIH grant to spur use of patient reported outcomes in EHRs
Healthcare IT News ~ Mike Milliard ~ 27/10/2016

In an effort to advance the use of patient-reported outcomes for research and care delivery, a coalition of nine universities has been awarded a $6.3 million grant by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health.

How to ensure OpenNotes is a positive experience for patients
FierceHealthcare ~ Susan D Hall ~ 28/10/2016

With more than 6 million Americans now with access to their doctor’s notes through a patient portal, one doctor offers several suggestions for using them in a positive way.

The president of the association representing the medical software and health IT industry has launched a broadside at the chaotic decision-making emanating from the government and the Department of Health, but has promised to give the new Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) “a red hot go” to see if industry, clinicians and government can work together to improve digital health systems.

Emma Hossack, president of the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA), told the RACGP eHealth Forum in Melbourne yesterday that the new approach taken by the ADHA towards industry was a “quantum leap” from previously strained relationships, but that the industry was still being put under huge pressure to implement government policy initiatives that its clients do not like, such as changes to the eHealth Practice Incentives Program (ePIP) requiring uploads to the My Health Record or the ill-advised Medicare co-pay.

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) has managed to wrangle the medical software industry, the jurisdictions and healthcare providers on board a new program to work towards a functioning, interoperable secure messaging system, adopting a cooperative model that it says will ensure the agency is held to account for its work.

As reported by Pulse+IT yesterday, the ADHA has set up a program board headed by the chair of the RACGP's expert committee on eHealth, Nathan Pinskier, and eHealth Queensland CEO Mal Thatcher, along with WA community representative Fiona Panagoulias, that will tackle the lack of interoperability in secure messaging as a priority.

The three Wellington region primary health organisations that have got together to look for a new practice management system are still evaluating the shortlist of potential vendors released back in May, but are planning to try out the Indici web-based system being built for Pinnacle Midlands Health Network by Irish firm Valentia Technologies alongside current provider Medtech Global.

Back in May, Compass Health, Central PHO and Te Awakairangi Health Network released a shortlist of four providers for a preferred PMS for each respective GP network as existing PMSs in use are due to be upgraded.

Community care software vendor Icon Global has launched the next generation of its carelink+ platform, this week releasing a web-based version called carelinkAIR that will give care providers in the field full access to assessments, care plans and will allow client welfare feedback on a tablet or mobile device.

Geelong-based Icon Global specialises in providing client relationship management software to organisations providing community-based aged care, disability care, mental health care and for children and family service providers.

It may have been promised many times in the last six years but a series of breakthroughs in making the rival secure messaging systems interoperable and sustainable is set to be announced, with the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) to convene a new program board to guide development on a national basis and the vendors working together to overcome some remaining technical barriers.

Pulse+IT has confirmed that the ADHA will set up a secure messaging program board co-chaired by the RACGP's Nathan Pinskier and eHealth Queensland CEO Mal Thatcher, while developments have taken place in the background to ensure the national Health Provider Directory (HPD), which is intended to function as an address book for secure messaging endpoint locations services, is functioning as it should.

An electronic handover system, a telehealth approach to medications adherence for TB, a tailored medicines information system and a shared preoperative workbench for elective surgery patients are the four concepts shortlisted for the 2016 Clinicians Challenge at the Health Informatics New Zealand conference in Auckland next week.

The Clinicians Challenge, sponsored by the Ministry of Health and supported by HiNZ, involves two categories: one for projects in active development and one for new ideas.

Over the last 18 months or so, a North Island primary health organisation and an Irish technology firm have been working on a small revolution in clinical software for general practices in New Zealand.

Long dominated by Medtech but able to support a competitive industry including MyPractice and Profile – with new entrant Best Practice currently developing a New Zealand version of its popular system to add to the handful of sites using Houston Medical – most PHOs in the country tend to all use the same vendor while practices manage their system on their own.

When Pinnacle Midlands Health Network began to look at updating its PMS, however, it decided to take a different tack. It has decided to build its own cloud-based, user-designed system called Indici in association with Irish firm Valentia Technologies, tailored specifically to its needs and able to support the health care home model.

There were three District Health Boards that stood out from the crowd in the survey released earlier this year by the Ministry of Health about electronic medical record adoption in New Zealand, and they all had one thing in common: they were the first to introduce an electronic medications management system, essential for reaching stage five of the HIMSS EMRAM hospital inpatient score.

Waitemata, Canterbury and Southern DHBs all scored above stage five while the rest averaged about 2.3 in the survey, the latter on par with Australian hospitals but both lagging many of parts of the world.

Exactly what the HIMSS EMRAM score is and how it relates to the New Zealand setting is the subject of a half-day workshop being hosted by the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics team's Tina Hashim, along with the director of the northern electronic health record (NEHR) program for the Northern Regional Alliance (NRA) Will Reedy, in advance of the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Auckland next week.

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) is planning to open up consultations on the new national digital health strategy in the first week of November, aiming to put meat on the bones of a plan to take to the Commonwealth and the jurisdictions to guide not only the agency's work program but government investment in digital health over the next four or five years.

The long-delayed 'refresh' of Deloitte's 2008 national eHealth strategy is not likely to see the light of day as the new agency's new CEO, Tim Kelsey, puts his own mark on the agenda, planning a round of co-design and co-production workshops to inform the development of the strategy to take to COAG.

Former AMA president Steve Hambleton has agreed to take charge of several priority projects in a non-executive role for the new Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), where he is set to be joined by other clinical and industry experts to oversee elements of the agency's work program.

And joining the agency in an executive role is general practitioner and patient safety researcher Meredith Makeham, who has been appointed as the agency's chief medical adviser and elevated to the executive team.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of international health IT and eHealth news for the week ending October 23:

Two evaluations of eHealth under way
Canadian Healthcare Technology ~ Staff writer ~ 19/10/2016

The Liberal government is scrambling to get a valuation of eHealth Ontario before the auditor general releases what is expected to be a damning report on the controversial electronic health agency.

Video on alleged medical device flaws stirs controversy
Healthcare Info Security ~ Marianne Kolbasuk McGee ~ 20/10/2016

Investment firm Muddy Waters Capital and security research start-up MedSec Holdings are again stirring up controversy, this time by releasing a video spotlighting more alleged cybersecurity flaws in St. Jude Medical cardiac devices.

The software engineer who invented the Swasthya Slate mobile device, which can perform 33 diagnostic tests in the field through an Android tablet or phone, will appear live by video conference at the annual Health Informatics Technology WA (HITWA) conference being held in Perth on November 4.

Kanav Kahol graduated with a PhD from the Arizona State University, where he was an assistant professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering and an assistant professor adjunct at the Mayo Clinic, before being appointed to head the Affordable Health Technologies Division for the Public Health Foundation of India.

ASX-listed medications adherence firm MedAdvisor has been chosen to provide its medication management software platform to patients privately insured with Bupa when they are discharged from selected Healthscope hospitals.

Under Bupa and Healthscope's 'Always Events' agreement, which is being rolled out initially in four of Healthscope's 50 hospitals, MedAdvisor's platform will be offered to patients to help them take their medications correctly when they return home, with the aim of reducing medication-related readmissions.